VOT-Analysis: The Production of Stops by Agrammatic Palestinians

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the VOT characteristics of Palestinian Broca’s aphasics and to compare them with those of normal speakers. The acoustic analysis has revealed aberrations in the VOTs of plosive sounds in speech of Broca’s aphasics, by exhibiting an overlap between the places of articulation of the stops under examination /t/ and /d/. In contrast, the normal speakers demonstrate full normal VOT distributions for voiced and voiceless stops. Broca’s aphasics were unable to maintain the normal voicing distinction for Arabic stop consonants. In addition, they revealed different patterns of VOT distribution with the tendency towards greater prevoicing for voiced stops.