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This paper examines the understudied phenomenon of consonant gemination in the pronunciation of English among Levantine Arabic learners of English (LA learners). The very few studies that touched on gemination among LA learners attributed gemination to spelling in the target language (English). This study challenges this analysis and demonstrates that gemination is primarily a phonological phenomenon that is triggered by first language under-represented structural rules as well as Universal Grammar (UG) markedness principles. Data were elicited through semi-structured interviews with three groups of LA learners. Contrary to previous studies (on other phonological aspects), which argue that interference errors decrease over time, findings show that gemination is attested across all groups of LA learners and persists even among advanced learners. Results show that interface phenomena involving more than one phonological level pose a great challenge to second language learners.

This study focuses on the evaluation of native and non-native English instructors by 140 students enrolled in the Intensive English Program of a university in the United Arab Emirates. A forty-minute writing task was given to the candidates to elaborate on the contributions of the native and non-native instructors from various perspectives within a Grounded Theory approach. These perspectives included the instructor's oral skills, literacy skills, grammar, vocabulary, culture, teaching style, knowledge of L1 and experience of L2. The study adopts qualitative research methods in collecting and analyzing the data, where a Discourse Analytical approach is used to explore the students' perceptions of both native and non-native instructors. The results show that learners have positive perceptions of both native and non-native instructors, with distinctive qualities for each group. The findings point out that native speakerism is not a decisive factor in learners' preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first study that investigates polysyllabic shortening in Arabic. It aims to find out the extent to which Modern Standard Arabic employs this phonetic mechanism, which is usually associated with stress-timed languages. Data were collected from 10 Jordanian speakers reading 6 sets of words representing the six monophthongs in Arabic in a carrier sentence. Based on the acoustic analysis of 180 vowels, it was found that the vowels in monosyllabic words were significantly longer than their counterparts in polysyllabic words. However, the differences between the vowels in disyllabic and trisyllabic words were much smaller. Findings suggest that polysyllabic shortening is not invoked as a mechanism to maintain the stress-timed rhythm of stress-timed languages. Rather, it seems to be a universal phonetic feature that applies in different degrees that are commensurate with the rhythm of the language in question [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work argues for the existence of multiple default regularities of plural formation in Arabic. As evidenced in the corpus of loanword adaptation in Jordanian Arabic, this study calls for a reassessment of the treatment of idiosyncratic plural forms in the mental lexicon. This investigation is in line with the dual mechanism theory where both memory and rule are active, but with more reliance on the default rule (feminine sound plural –aat) over memory (broken plural patterns). This avoidance of broken plural, which is less predictable and less transparent, is explained by a limited mental lexicon that defines such loanwords and thus blocks a successful mapping of the broken plural’s inflection in the memory. The failure of broken plural retrieval, especially with words that do not match the canonical root system (tri-consonantal), calls for the application of the default feminine sound plural, the most productive, transparent, and regular formation. As a result, frequency and memory association predicted by prosodic similarity between loanwords and the broken plural patterns do not contribute to avoiding the default -aat overgeneralization in the short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech errors are an important source of information to understand language processing and production. Earlier research focused on different types of errors including semantic and phonological errors while malapropisms, which refer to slips of the tongue involving whole word substitutions that share phonological similarities but are not related semantically, have not received adequate attention in the Arabic language. Drawing on malapropisms in Jordanian Arabic, we bring evidence on the supremacy of suprasegmental phonological aspects in Arabic phonology. This is unexpected as stress in Arabic is non-phonemic and fully predictable, besides Arabic rhythm is much less stress-timed than that of Germanic languages. Data was collected from spontaneous speech over a period of three years. Results showed that malapropisms share the primary stress position, the number of syllables and the word rhythmic pattern with the target words. To a lesser degree, the target and the error share the same rime and initial segments. Findings suggest that suprasegmental features are very crucial in Arabic phonology, like in Indo-European languages. Evidence suggests that formal similarity that is based on the syllabic and metrical structure of words plays a significant role in language processing and the organization of the mental lexicon in Arabic, which suggests that this is a language universal. Furthermore, our findings do not agree with earlier claims that Arabic has a flat syllabic structure. Rather, evidence suggests that Arabic, like English, has a hierarchical syllable structure, which seems to represent another language universal. More research on other Arabic dialects is recommended to corroborate these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is, largely, a systematic review that identifies and synthesizes research data from different resources with the aim of drawing conclusions about the effect of co-speech gestures on learning a foreign language (FL). We used PubMed and PubMed Central as the databases for our search; we narrowed the search mainly to experimental psychology and neuroscience studies that focus on the effect of gesturing on learning/learning a foreign language. Analysis of our synthesis of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that gesturing positively affects learning in general. Interest in investigating the effect of gesturing on learning a foreign language appeared recently, and most studies in this area focus on teaching and learning foreign language vocabulary; however, research in this area is still limited in comparison to research on gesturing and cognition in general. The reviewed cognitive psychology studies suggest that gesturing enhances FL learning efficiency and memory retrieval. Research in modern neuroscience agrees that gesturing strengthens the neural interconnectedness of the cognitive process involved in learning a foreign language; this especially concerns supporting the networks of sensory and sensorimotor representations of words in the brain. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience provides strong evidence that gestures enhance and aid foreign language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the acoustic properties of function words in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as produced by Jordanian speakers. Data were elicited from twelve participants reading a short story embedded with seventeen function words of different types. The vowels in these words were analyzed acoustically in terms of duration, intensity, F0, F1, and F2 and then compared with their counterparts in content words. F0 results suggest that MSA has four levels of prosodic prominence: vowels in stressed syllables in content words > vowels in stressed syllables in disyllabic function words > vowels in unstressed syllables in content words > vowels in monosyllabic function words. Duration and intensity results, however, did not reflect this four-way distinction in prominence; only vowels in stressed content words were meaningfully distinguished from the vowels in the other types of words. More interestingly, results show that MSA does not reduce the quality of less prominent vowels, as in Germanic languages. Overall, results suggest that reduced prominence in function words is a language universal, but its realization is language specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting an Optimality-theoretic approach, this paper examines gemination in English loanwords in Ammani Arabic (AA). Data come from a corpus of 1200 loanwords as produced by 12 AA monolingual native speakers. Results show that gemination, which is not attested in the source input, is induced to satisfy AA structural constraints and to render the output better well-formed. Of particular interest, results show that the introduction of English loanwords into AA highlights the activity of a constraint that requires prosodic words in AA, and probably many Arabic dialects, to be left-aligned with a foot. This constraint enhances our understanding of many aspects of Arabic phonology such as stress assignment and foot formation. The study has important implications for Arabic phonology, loanword phonology and second language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]