Geminate Attrition in the Speech of Arabic–English Bilinguals Living in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study has three goals. First, it examines phonological attrition of the Arabic geminate (i.e., long sound)-singleton contrast in the speech of native speakers of Arabic who acquired English after puberty. Second, it compares geminate production in late bilinguals to early bilinguals. Third, it investigates whether universal phonetic/acoustic factors have an effect on the degree of attrition across generations. Participants performed a delayed word repetition task, where mean consonant duration was measured and compared across the two bilingual groups and compared with native speakers of Arabic. Results show that a geminate-singleton duration ratio continuum across groups was formed, where monolingual speakers of Arabic had the highest values, followed by late bilinguals, and then early bilinguals. These results are interpreted as evidence that language remains malleable across the lifespan. Moreover, whereas there was no effect of manner of articulation, voiced geminates showed a significantly higher degree of attrition across both bilingual groups. In addition, inherently longer geminates attrited at a significantly higher rate. Implications for models of phonological attrition are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".