Geminate attrition in the speech of Arabic–English bilinguals living in the United States

This study explores the phenomenon of language attrition. Specifically, we investigate the phonetic properties of consonant gemination across three groups of speakers of Palestinian Arabic: monolinguals (i.e., native speakers born in Palestine who have lived there their entire life, n = 5), late bilinguals (i.e., speakers born in Palestine who emigrated to the US during their teens, n = 6), and heritage speakers (i.e., speakers of Palestinian descent, born in the US and who speak both English and Arabic in their daily lives, n = 7). All speakers were in their mid-1920s. The participants were tested using a delayed word repetition task. The stimuli comprised 158 bi-syllabic Arabic minimal and near-minimal pairs (e.g., /ħam:aːm/ “bathroom” versus /ħama:m/ “pigeon”) including long and short stops, fricatives, and sonorants. We controlled for stress and syllabic position. Distractors were also included. The acoustic analysis is underway, and consists of manually aligning the target consonants, extracting the mean consonant duration and comparing it across groups. Additional measures include voicing, aspiration, and formant transitions. The findings will enable us to address the question whether universal phonetic factors (from the perspective of Markedness Theory) have an effect on degree of attrition by specifically comparing consonants from different voicing categories and manners of articulation.