Off the back of their success in winning the Peter Ladefoged Prize at BAAP 2018, Jalal and Ghada have now had their work on VOT of Arabic stops published in the Journal of Phonetics special edition ‘Marking 50 Years of Research on Voice Onset Time’. Check it out here – “Acoustic correlates of the voicing contrast in Lebanese Arabic singleton and geminate stops”

Highlights:

• The voicing contrast in Lebanese Arabic interacts with gemination in complex ways.
• Closure duration is key for the voicing and gemination contrasts in medial position.
• Voicing patterns point to [voice] as primary and [tense] as secondary feature.
• More devoicing is seen in voiced geminates than singletons.
• Release properties of voiced geminates align more with lenis than fortis languages.