Perception of Focus in Qassimi Arabic
This study examines whether native listeners of Qassimi Arabic can identify the location of focus in spoken utterances. Twenty-five native speakers participated in a perception experiment using 360 utterances produced under three focus conditions: neutral focus (NF), narrow information focus (IF), and narrow contrastive focus (CF). The stimuli were selected from the production corpus reported by Alzaidi, Xu, et al. (2026). The results show that listeners correctly identified NF in 65% of the trials. For IF, identification accuracy was 63%, 60%, and 45% in sentence-initial, penultimate, and final positions, respectively. For CF, the corresponding rates were 70%, 65%, and 48%. Listeners identified initial and penultimate focus more accurately than final focus. When focus occurred in the final position, listeners frequently selected the “no emphasis” response. These findings show that focus identification in Qassimi Arabic varies across sentence positions. This pattern is consistent with the positional differences reported in the earlier production study. However, the present experiment does not establish the contribution of individual acoustic cues to focus perception.
Wh-in-situ questions in Taif Hijazi Arabic place the wh-expression in its canonical sentence-final position, leaving no lexical marker of interrogativity in the preceding region.
This study examines whether native listeners of Qassimi Arabic can identify the location of focus in spoken utterances. Twenty-five native speakers participated in a perception experiment using…
This study investigates how prosodic focus is encoded in Hijazi Arabic using a two-stage machine-learning framework trained on an annotated corpus of scripted speech.