This section defines the key terms that are used throughout this thesis.
2.2.1 Fricatives
Fricative sounds are characterised by friction resulting from a continual airflow through a narrow channel in the oral cavity. The air flows rapidly through specific positions of constriction to form turbulence in the flow and creates a fricative sound (Jongman, Wayland, & Wong, 2000; Ladefoged & Johnson, 2014). Examples are the initial sounds in ‘fly’, ‘shy’, and ‘sun’. MSA has 13 fricative phonemes, which are: /z/, /s/, /sˤ/, /θ/, /f/, /ʃ/, /ħ/, /h/, /χ/, /ɣ/, /ʕ/, /ð/, /ðˤ/ (Al-Ani, 1970).
2.2.2 Pharyngealisation
The term ‘pharyngealisation’ is a description of a speech sound that has a primary articulation in the anterior vocal tract and a secondary articulation in which the back of the tongue moves towards the rear wall of the pharynx (Card, 1983). The secondary articulation often influences the surrounding vowels. This is usually realised by the movement of the vowels towards the rear of the vowel space, which varies, based on the speaker’s country or city of origin (Al Khatib, 2008; Watson, 1999). Examples of pharyngealised consonants are the Arabic /sˤ/ in /sˤabi/ ‘boy’ and /tˤ/ in /tˤalib/ ‘student’.
2.2.3 Emphatics and Non-emphatics
In MSA, the pharyngealised consonants are traditionally called emphatics
(Watson, 2002). They are four consonants: two stops /tˁ/ and /dˁ/; and two fricatives /ðˁ/ and /sˁ/. There are four plain equivalent phonemes of Arabic emphatic phonemes, which are /t/, /d/, /s/ and /ð/, and which are called non-emphatics and are articulated
only by coronal approximation, i.e., the movement of the front of the tongue towards the dental and alveolar ridge area of the oral cavity which, in this case, results in a complete closure (/t/, /d/) or a narrow approximation (/s/, /ð/) between the articulators. Examples of a minimal pair containing emphatic and non-emphatic sounds are /sˁar/ ‘became’ and /sar/ ‘walked’. The primary phonetic place of articulation of both the emphatic and non-emphatic sound is the same; however, they vary by the position of the back of the tongue, as the tongue when pronouncing the emphatics is raised further back than the non-emphatics. In all cases, the velum is raised.
2.2.4 L2 Speech Perception
Speech perception is the process and mechanism by which human speech is heard, understood and processed in the brain (Fitch, Miller, & Tallal, 1997). L2 speech perception research aims at understanding how non-native listeners recognise speech sounds and use acoustic cues to understand the spoken form of the target language. The pedagogical aims through investigating L2 speech perception are achieved by
understanding the relationship between learners’ L1s and the target language, which helps in enhancing L2 pronunciation teaching and in building applications that aid L2 learners to differentiate speech sounds belonging to different phonetic categories (Derwing & Munro, 2015).
2.2.5 L2 Speech Production
L2 speech production is defined as the process by which L2 learners translate their thoughts through speaking the target language, which includes words,
organisation of grammatical forms, and sounds. This process is divided into two forms: speaking and pronunciation. The difference between pronunciation and speaking is
confusing. Sometimes these two terms are, as Gilakjani and Ahmadi (2011) have stated, “wrongly applied interchangeably” (p. 74).
Pronunciation is a part of speaking, and they are both productive skills, which are always combined. Speaking involves producing, receiving and processing information, which requires constructing meaning in an interactive process (Brown, 1994). For example, speaking involves a level of ideas, words and sentences. It also involves fluency, which Baker and Westrup (2003) defined as ‘speaking with ease and without thinking of possible errors’ (p. 90). Pronunciation, on the other hand, is related to sounds and the way of producing them to construct meaning. Yates and Zielinski (2009) clarified that pronunciation includes consonants, vowels, and aspects of speech such as stress, timing, rhythm, intonation and phrasing. These two forms of speech production cannot be used separately. As Macdonald (2015) pointed out,
“[p]ronunciation is part of speaking, and together they are central to the dynamic processes of the creation of identities that individuals engage in on a daily basis” (p. A- 34). This study investigates the accuracy in the pronunciation of certain L2 sounds, which may affect L2 learners’ speaking abilities in general.
2.2.6 Features of Pronunciation
It is important to define ‘pronunciation’ and understand its features. Schmitt (2013) defined pronunciation as “a term used to capture all aspects of how we employ speech sounds for communication” (p. 203). There are two key features of
pronunciation, and each feature is comprised of many attributes. Figure 2.1 clearly shows the features of pronunciation.
Figure 2.1: Pronunciation features (Murcia-Celce, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996)
All these features have undergone a variety of studies (e.g. Behzadi & Fahimniya, 2014; Derwing, 2010; Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016; Gooch, Saito, & Lyster, 2016;
Hellmuth, 2014; Osmany & Azad, 2016; Rallo Fabra & Jacob, 2015). However, and with all these studies, linguists still consider pronunciation a neglected area, and the attention given in research to other language skills such as reading and writing is not given to pronunciation (Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016; Hashemian & Fadaei, 2011; Osmany & Azad, 2016).
2.2.7 Analysis of Speech
Speech analysis is the study of speech sounds for particular purposes. It represents the acoustic properties of speech such as formants and amplitude, by transforming the acoustic data into spectral and temporal forms. In the past, spectral analysis could be obtained only in laboratory settings. Nowadays, spectrograms and waveforms can be easily generated through any type of computer platform (Derwing & Munro, 2015), often using free programs, such as Praat (Boersma, 2002) and Speech Analyser (Williamson, 1979).