# Probing Syllable Structure Through Acoustic Methods: Case-studies on American English and Jazani Arabic This repository hosts the data and scripts used for the following paper: Durvasula, K., Ruthan, M., Heidenreich, S., & Lin, Y.-H. (2021). entitled "Probing Syllable Structure Through Acoustic Measurements: Case-studies on American English and Jazani Arabic". *Phonology*, 38(2). ## Note about the paper In this article, we presented three production experiments that probed the temporal alignment of word-initial consonants in American English and Jazani Arabic using acoustic methods. In Experiment 1, we showed that word-initial consonant sequences in American English have an equivalent c-centre-to-anchor interval stability in the acoustics, consistent with previous articulatory experiments. The results were consistent with the phonological understanding that English syllables allow complex onsets and have c-centre-to-anchor stability. In Experiment 2, we showed that word-initial consonant sequences in Jazani Arabic have right-edge-to-anchor interval stability. Furthermore, we observed that the stability pattern was the same for all the consonant sequences that were tested, which is different from what Hermes et al. (2013) found for Italian. Our results thereby suggest, in line with other phonological criteria, that the word-initial consonant sequences in Jazani Arabic do not form a complex onset. In Experiment 3, we replicated the results of Experiment 2 using only rising sonority sequences. Crucially, since the words were produced in isolation, the results in Experiment 3 cannot be explained by appealing to resyllabification of the first consonant in a consonant sequence to the preceding word’s final open syllable. The results that we present show a stability across speakers and test items for both language groups, and highlight the possibility of using acoustic techniques to help identify the onset organisation in other languages. Based on our results, we suggest that the information about syllable structure is not present in any *single* acoustic token; instead it is observable in the *pattern of structured co-variation* that is observed across tokens. ## Data ### Coding Sheets There are two coding sheets used in the data analysis and plotting --- one for the English experiment, and the other for the two Jazani experiments. ### Measurements There are three measurement files that include the RightEdge and C-Centre measurements presented in the paper. The files also include LeftEdge and CMidPoint measurements in case anyone is interested --- these were not presented in the paper. ### Praat scripts The folder contains the Praat scripts used to extract the acoustic measurements from the TextGrids. There are separate scripts for English and Jazani as the annotation schemes were different. ### TextGrids The folder contains three sub-folders that contain the original TextGrids for each of the experiments in the paper. ### Analysis script This script contains the R code for all the data munging, plots and statistical analyses presented in the paper.