Preboundary Lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic: Interplay of Syllable and Word Boundaries

Abstract

The present acoustic study examined preboundary lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic, focusing on the duration of the high vowel /i/ within syllable boundaries, and across syllable and word boundaries: syllable‑medial (/CVN/), syllable‑final (/CV.N/), and word‑final (/CV#N/) positions. Results revealed a gradient increase in vowel duration with boundary strength, establishing a three‑way vowel duration distinction: shortest in medial position, longer across syllable boundaries, and longest across word boundaries. Unlike prior findings for the low vowel /a/, which showed lengthening only at word boundaries, the high vowel /i/ exhibited progressively increasing duration across both syllable and word boundaries. These results suggest that preboundary lengthening is shaped by prosodic structure. Cross‑linguistic comparison situates Arabic within a syllable domain for preboundary lengthening, contrasting with the rime in English and the mora in Japanese but aligning with languages such as Modern Hebrew. These results are discussed in terms of language‑specific phonetic implementation that demarcates prosodic phrasing, contributing to ongoing debates at the phonetics‑prosody interface.