Does vowel space size depend on la Evidence from two Arabic d

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of the number of vowels a language has on the size of its vocalic space, in the production of speech from two Arabic dialects, Moroccan and Jordanian Arabic, and from French. 5 speakers per language (or dialect) recorded a list of vowels in 3 conditions: vowels were embedded in 1) Words, 2) Syllables, and 3) produced in Isolation. For each condition, there were 3 consonantal contexts: /b d k/. Our results corroborate the hypothesis that vowel inventory size affects the size of the acoustic vowel spaces: the larger the vowel inventory, the bigger the acoustic vowel space.