This study investigates the stop voicing contrast in Palestinian Arabic (PA) by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) in both production and perception. An acoustic analysis of the recordings of 8 speakers showed that word-initial voiced stops in sentence context have an average VOT of -93 msec, and word-initial voiceless stops one of 29 msec. PA thus belongs, like most dialects of Arabic, to true voicing languages, i.e., languages with a contrast between voicing lead and short lag VOT.

We furthermore tested whether the phoneme /b/, without voiceless counterpart /p/ in PA, has similar VOT values to /d, d^ʕ/, which have voiceless counterparts /t, t^ʕ/. Similarly, we compared /k/, without counterpart /g/ in the PA dialect we investigated, to /t, t^ʕ/. For /b/ we found very similar VOT values to /d, d^ʕ/, while for /k/ we found a difference to /t, t^ʕ/, attributable to a general tendency of velars to have longer VOT than denti-alveolars. We thus found no evidence for a less contrastive realization of unpaired plosives in PA.

In a categorization experiment of the denti-alveolar phoneme pairs with the same 8 speakers, VOT proved sufficient as a perceptual cue, though f0 of the following vowel also influenced the categorization.