The Influence of Guttural Consonants /χ/, /ħ/, and /h/ on Vowel /a/ in Saudi Arabic

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study which investigates the influence of Saudi Arabic guttural consonants /χ/, /ħ/ and /h/ on the vowel /a/ when they are adjacent and in the same syllable. Cohn (2007, 2009), Flemming (2001), and Keating (1996) discuss a unified model in which phonology and phonetics are treated as two distinct elements of one domain where each element has an effect on the other to some degree. McCarthy (1991, 1994), Rose (1996), Zawaydeh (1999, 2004), and BinMuqbil (2006) presented phonological studies on gutturals, as well as discussions on gutturals as a natural class, which uphold the phonological aspect of Cohn’s (2009) unified model. The aim of this study is to address the phonetic aspect of Cohn’s (2009) unified model by analyzing the phonetic effects of guttural-vowel coarticulation. An acoustic analysis method was used as a framework for this investigation to extract first formant frequency (F1) and second formant frequency (F2) to measure the influence in the coarticulation. For the purpose of this study, seven native Saudi Arabic speakers were recorded pronouncing 70 Saudi Arabic words. The results showed that guttural consonants have an influence on the vowel /a/ by lowering and backing it when they are adjacent and in the same syllable, while the vowel /a/ in the nonguttural consonants is raising and fronting their adjacent vowel /a/ in the same syllable in comparison with the vowel /a/ in the guttural environment.