H Al-Tairi, Y Aldholmi (2025). Ultrasonic-Acoustic Investigation of the Tongue Retraction Spread of Arabic Emphatics: A Preliminary Study. Al-ʿArabiyya: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic. 58(1), 1-31.

Journal Article

We conducted a comparative articulatory- acoustic investigation of the tongue retrac-

tion spread (RS) of triggering versus nontriggering segments (emphatics versus

plain), as well as the blockers (/i-iː/, /j/, and /ʃ/) thereof, in the low central vowels

(/a-aː/) in the Yemeni versus Palestinian Arabic (YA versus PA) dialects. Four native

Arabic speakers produced a set of items while being audio- and video-recorded via

2D portable ultrasound machine. The articulatory/ultrasound data were processed

and analyzed with ImageJ, while Praat was used to mark the boundaries of vowels

and identify their midpoints. The results demonstrated that, in both dialects, RS is

triggered by emphatics as observed in the properties of low central vowels but var-

iedly reoriented or restricted, or both, by directionality and the presence or absence

of (potential) blocking segments. Our findings emphasize the phonetic complexity of

RS, underscoring the need for large- scale studies to further explore this phenomenon

and its important implications for computational, clinical, and forensic phonetics.