Comparing Prosodic Timing Effects in Hadari and Bedouin Dialects of Kuwaiti Arabic: A Speech Cycling Study

We examined differences in speech timing between the Hadari and Bedouin Kuwaiti Arabic dialects using speech cycling. In our version of the paradigm, speakers repeated six-syllable phrases, with the start of each repetition aligned in time with a metronome beat. Previous speech cycling work finds that stressed vowel onsets tend to occur at harmonic phases (e.g., 1/2) within the Phrase Repetition Cycle (PRC), potentially reflecting coordination between prosodic units. Hadari has phonetically stronger stress contrast, with greater unstressed syllable reduction than Bedouin, which may afford closer alignment to harmonic phases. Six trochaic and six iambic sentences were read aloud by 18 Hadari and 18 Bedouin speakers at three metronome trial rates: slow, medium, and fast. The phases of the final (external) and medial (internal) stressed syllables—heavy, CVV(C), or light, CVC—relative to the PRC were analyzed. For the external phase, Hadari tended to align light syllables earlier in the PRC and more similarly to heavy syllables than Bedouin. Vowel duration analysis suggested that this pattern may be due to greater compression of preceding unstressed vowels in Hadari. This suggests that local timing patterns, in particular variation in durational stress contrast, modulate rhythmic coordination between prosodic units.