1. Intelligibility of voiced and voiceless consonants produced by Lebanese Arabic speakers with respect to vowel length Romy Ghanem

2. Introduction: Research Area Interphonology Vowel length difference in Arabic and English Effect of vowel length on intelligibility of consonants

3. Aims/Justification Too much focus on the production of English consonants or vowels by Arabic speakers Not enough research on the impact of change in vowel length patterns on the intelligibility of voiced and voiceless consonants

4. References Cebrian, J. (2006). Experience and the use of non-native duration in L2 vowel categorization. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 372–387. Flege, J. E. (1997). Effects of experience on non-native speakers’ production and perception of English vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 25, 437-470. Levi, S., Winters, S. & Pisoni D. (2007). Speaker-independent factors affecting the perception of foreign accent in a second language. Acoustical Society of America, 2327– 2338. Major, R. C. (1987). The natural phonology of second language acquisition. In James, A. and Leather, J. (Ed.), Sound patterns in second language acquisition, (pp.207-224).Dordrecht Holland: Foris Publications. Munro, M. J. (1993). Productions of English vowels by native speakers of Arabic: Acoustic measurements and accentedness ratings. Language and Speech, 36 (1), 39-66. Raphael, L. J. (1975). The physiological control of durational differences between vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants in English. Journal of Phonetics, 3, 25-33.

5. Research Questions 1) Is there a significant difference between the vowel length patterns of an advanced Lebanese Arabic speaker and those of a native speaker? 2) Is there a significant difference between the vowel length patterns of an advanced Lebanese speaker and a less proficient one? 3) Do the TOEFL scores correlate with the intelligibility ratings of advanced Lebanese Arabic speakers and lower-level speakers?

6. Methodology Participants: 3 groups of participants and one panel of judges 1) Group 1: Lower-level Lebanese speakers of English (15) 2) Group 2: Advanced Lebanese learners of English (15) 3) Group 3: Three untrained (non-linguistic) native speakers (most likely undergraduates) 4) Panel of judges: three linguistically-trained colleagues

7. Methodology (cont’d) Materials/ Instruments: 1) Paragraph for students to read 2) PRATT

8. Methodology (cont’d) Procedure 1) Compile audio samples from all three groups of participants. 2) Retrieve the words that contain the minimal pairs. Measure and compare the vowel lengths of all three groups (use the average vowel length of the native speakers as the “norm”). 3) Give the retrieved words to the panel of judges and ask them to listen to each one several times. 4) Ask the judges to transcribe what they have heard and then rate the intelligibility of the voiced/voiceless consonants on a scale of 0 to 100. 5) A spreadsheet will be created for each participant (including the native speakers) with the vowel length and intelligibility scores given by each judge.

9. Anticipated Problems/Limitations Imbalance in levels of speakers Specific phonetic features One dialect of Arabic language

10. Expected Findings Proximity of vowel length to norm and the intelligibility scores are directly proportional Vowel length difference between lower- level speaker and advanced speaker not as great as TOEFL score predicts Intelligibility scores not that different

11. Thank You!