This paper asks whether there is an ‘interlanguage intelligibility benefit’ in perception of word-stress, as has been reported for global sentence recognition. L1 English listeners, and L2 English listeners who are L1 speakers of Arabic dialects from Jordan and Egypt, performed a binary forced-choice identification task on English near-minimal pairs (such as[ˈɒbdʒɛkt] ~ [əbˈdʒɛkt]) produced by an L1 English speaker, and two L2 English speakers from Jordan and Egypt respectively. The results show an overall advantage for L1 English listeners, which replicates the findings of an earlier study for general sentence recognition, and which is also consistent with earlier findings that L1 listeners rely more on structural knowledge than on acoustic cues in stress perception. Non-target-like L2 productions of words with final stress (which are primarily cued in L1 production by vowel reduction in the initial unstressed syllable) were less accurately recognized by L1 English listeners than by L2 listeners, but there was no evidence of a generalized advantage for L2 listeners in response to other L2 stimuli.

Recent work has highlighted the consistent co-occurrence of a partial rise-fall prosodic contour with a segmental vowel epenthesis marker to mark yes-no questions in the Tunisian Arabic of Tunis; the incidence of the segmental marker (epenthesis) varied according to the external factor gender, but did not vary according to language internal factors, such as phonological environment. In this paper we explore the relationship between the prosodic and segmental question-marking strategies further in a production study which investigates: i) regional variation between the north (Tunis) and the south-east of Tunisia; and ii) potential transfer of one or both strategies into speakers’ spoken second language English. Greater incidence of epenthesis is observed in yes-no questions produced by speakers from the south-east, accompanied by a different prosodic contour (with a lower boundary tone), and a difference in the quality of the inserted vowel (tending towards [u]). In L2 English yes-no questions, a small subset of speakers displayed TA epenthesis in their English productions, but only when accompanied by a TA rise-fall contour. Taken together the results confirm the close relationship between the presence of epenthesis and the complexity of the accompanying prosodic contour (a rise-fall rather than a plain rise).

Presently there is no consensus regarding the interpretation and analysis of the stress system of Moroccan Arabic. This paper tests whether the acoustic realisation of syllables support one widely adopted interpretation of lexical stress, according to which stress is either penultimate or final depending on syllable weight. The experiment reports on word-initial syllables that differ in presumed stress status. Target words were embedded in a carrier sentence within a scripted mock dialogue to ensure that the measurements reflect lexical stress rather than phrase-level prominence. Results from all four acoustic parameters tested (f0, duration, Centre of Gravity and vowel quality) showed that there were no differences as a function of presumed stress status, thus failing to support an interpretation according to which stressed syllables are acoustically differentiated. We consider the results in relation to previous claims and observations, and conclude that the absence of acoustic correlates of presumed stress is compatible with the view that Moroccan Arabic lacks lexical stress.