Physiological and acoustic study of word initial post-lexical gemination in Moroccan Arabic

With the EMA technique we showed that post-lexical word initial [dd] of Moroccan Arabic is produced by our three speakers with a longer acoustic duration and articulatory gesture compared to its initial [d] cognate. The tongue tip gesture during initial [dd] and [d] generally have statistically similar height and amplitude. For two speakers, no significant velocity differences were recorded between [dd] and [d]. Our articulatory observations also show no C-center effect between [d(d)] and [u] in the [d(d)uda] items, which is in accord with the study of Shaw et al. (2009) on word initial [Ci], [CjCi] and [CkCjCi] clusters in MA which they use as an argument against complex onset in this language. Our results seem to show that initial hetero-morphemic geminate [dd] is a cluster of two hetero-syllabic consonants.