Prosodic Marking of Wh-in-Situ Questions in Taif Hijazi Arabic: Production and Perception Experiments
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 investigates whether speakers mark interrogativity prosodically before the wh-expression and whether listeners can identify sentence type from this region alone. In a production experiment, eleven native speakers of Taif Hijazi Arabic produced matched declaratives and wh-in-situ questions across four wh-types, yielding 1,760 utterances. Acoustic analysis showed significantly higher mean F0, maximum F0, minimum F0, and F0 excursion size in wh-questions, while duration and intensity did not differ significantly. These differences were consistent across the four experimental frames. In a perception experiment, thirty native listeners identified sentence type from 320 pre-wh stimuli with 85.3% overall accuracy. The findings indicate that F0 distinguishes declaratives from wh-in-situ questions before the sentence-final wh-expression and that listeners can use information from this preceding region to identify sentence type.
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.