Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation.Mostly, modern Arabic is printed non-diacritised. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye tracking experiment we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics, and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic-homographic were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences where in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., ‫بيد‬ /b i j a d/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritised sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb.Keywords: diacritics, reading Arabic, eye movements, garden path, parsing preferenceReading in a number of the world's languages has been studied using the methodology of tracking readers' eye movements (see e.g. Rayner, 1998;2009 the role of vowel phonology in Arabic in the computation of syntactic structure, and the construction of semantic representations). In addition, these unique properties allow us to pose novel questions concerning written language processing in general.Eye tracking is a non-intrusive way of studying the cognitive processes associated with reading since readers' eye movements are tightly linked with these processes (e.g., Liversedge & Findlay, 2000;Rayner, 1998;2009). The research reported here used eye-tracking methodology to explore readers'processing of Arabic vowel phonology, and whether, and how, this phonological processing interacts with syntactic processing.Arabic is an alphabetic language, which, like Hebrew, is written and read from right to left. Also like Hebrew, letters mainly denote consonant sounds, whereas short vowels are denoted by diacritical marks (diacritics hereafter, see Abu-Rabia, 2002;Haywood & Nahmad, 1965; Schulz, 2004), which are added to the written letters.This vowel information has the potential to disambiguate the pronunciation of words 1984; Bentin & Frost, 1987; Koriat, 1984); and offline measures in text reading tasks (e.g. reading speed and accuracy, or comprehension measures, e.g. Abu-Rabia, 1997a;1997b;. Some studies have suggested that the presence of diacritics contributes to improved reading accuracy and comprehension. Abu-Rabia (1997a), for instance, presented readers with single words, sentences and paragraphs, which were diacritised, or non-diacritised. The readers were 10th grade (about 16 years ...

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In this chapter, we describe aspects of the prosody of two Arabic dialects which have been studied within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework, namely (Tripoli) Lebanese Arabic and (Cairene) Egyptian Arabic. We do not claim to provide a model for Arabic intonation in general, nor a model of Arabic dialectal intonational variation, since research in this field is still largely unexplored 1 . Instead, we outline our independent findings for Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic (based on Chahal (2001) and Hellmuth (2006b) respectively) and compare the results of this research wherever possible. We show that significant variation between Arabic varieties exists and needs to be taken into account in an overall intonational model of the language.The LA data reported on in this chapter illustrates the variety spoken in the Northern city of Tripoli as used by seven educated urban speakers. The LA corpus comprises read data obtained from two controlled experiments examining issues of tonal alignment, phonetic correlates of prominence and focus (totaling 2970 utterances) and quasi-natural data elicited from a map-task conversation (in line with the HCRC map- We wish to acknowledge our debt to the speakers of LA and EA who provided our speech recordings and to colleagues in the Phonetics Lab of the University of Melbourne and the University of York; we thank Sun-Ah Jun and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript; all errors are our own. Data excerpts from the CallHome Egyptian Arabic Speech Supplement (Karins et al 2002) are included on the accompanying CD by kind permission of the Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order.1 For a summary of broad literature findings on various Arabic dialects, see Chahal (2006 X.2 Metrical phonologyArabic is classified as a stress accent language 2 (McCarthy 1979;Watson 2002 To avoid this problem, for LA, Chahal (2001; identified three levels of prominence (by auditory analysis) in a corpus of broad and narrow focus utterances:lexically stressed but unaccented syllables, lexically stressed and accented syllables, and nuclear accents (defined as the last, most prominent accent in a phrase). In both focus conditions, and all else being equal, syllables at higher levels of prominence showed higher F0 and/or higher RMS values, and/or longer duration, and more peripheral F1 and F2 vowel formant characteristics than the lower level (ANOVA results significant at p<0.001). 7 By differentiating between phrasal (accents and nuclear accents) and word-level prominence (lexically stressed but unaccented 6 Cf. Beckman & Edwards (1994).7 Note that although F0 is found to be the main correlate of prominence level for narrow focus utterances, it is not so for broad focus utterances. This is due to the "flat hat" contours (t'Hart et al, The evidence to date therefore suggests that phrase-level prominence in LA and EA is cued by both melodic and dynamic correlates, as also reported for other dialects. This matches the typo...

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].

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