The Production of Laterals by Arabic-English Bilingual Children

Bilal Ibrahim Alsharif and Razan Khasawneh

World Journal of English Language, 2025, vol. 15, issue 5, 301

Abstract: This study aims to measure the accentual feature of the acoustic properties of English and Arabic alveolar laterals produced by Arabic-English bilinguals. More precisely, it examines whether bilinguals develop or maintain separate spectral and temporal properties for the sounds of their community when these converge with the phonetic properties of their first language. Further, it investigates the effect of syllable position in the acoustic production of Arabic and English laterals. Finally, it explores if there is any phonetic convergence of the laterals in each language due to the elicitation of a bilingual language mode. The acoustic analysis of bilinguals' realizations of /l/ consists of the F1, F2, F2-F1, and F3-F2 differences values expressed in Hertz and Bark. These values are extracted from the midpoint of the laterals and realized in three contexts- word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions. The results reveal that bilinguals exhibit language-specific phonetic distribution and relatively acoustic accommodation in realizing laterals when code-switching tokens.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/wjel/article/download/26869/17192 (application/pdf)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/wjel/article/view/26869 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jfr:wjel11:v:15:y:2025:i:5:p:301

Access Statistics for this article

World Journal of English Language is currently edited by Joe Nelson

More articles in World Journal of English Language from Sciedu Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sciedu Press ().