Preboundary Lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic
Effects of Syllable and Word Boundaries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36602/faj.2026.n21.14Keywords:
Preboundary lengthening, prosodic hierarchy, Modern Standard Arabic, phonetics–phonology interfaceAbstract
This study examines preboundary lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic, focusing on the role of syllable structure and word boundaries within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic data were obtained from two female Lebanese broadcasters, targeting the vowel /a/ preceding nasal consonants (/n/, /m/) across three prosodic contexts: syllable-medial (/CVN/), syllable-final (/CV.N/), and word-final (/CV#N/). A total of 876 tokens were analysed using linear mixed-effects models. The results reveal significant preboundary lengthening exclusively in word-final position, while no statistically significant lengthening was observed in syllable-final or medial contexts. These findings indicate that the word, rather than the syllable or rime, constitutes the primary domain anchoring preboundary lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic. The results further suggest that prosodic boundary strength does not uniformly scale across lower-level domains, highlighting language-specific modulation of temporal patterns. This study contributes to ongoing cross-linguistic debates on prosodic structure and provides empirical evidence for the phonetics–phonology interface in Arabic.
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