Abstract
This thesis is one of the few acoustic studies on Tripolitanian Libyan Arabic (TLA). It provides an examination of voice onset time) VOT( which is one of the prominent features of plosive consonants. The stops inventory of TLA adopted in this experiment includes /b/,/t/, /d/, /tˤ/ ,/dˤ/, /k/, and /ɡ/. This study sheds light on some of the factors that affect VOT values in TLA. These factors are the place of articulation of the stop, the following vowel, and gender. Thus, six native speakers of TLA; three male participants and three female participants, were asked to produce 53 monosyllabic words embedded in a carrier sentence. All the above mentioned plosives occurred in word-initial position individually i.e. they were not in a cluster. The vowel context included the eight vowels in TLA, that is to say: /i/, /iː/, /a/, /aː/, /uː/, /u/, /eː/ and /o:/. The results of this study prove that the three factors mentioned above are of influence on VOT values. The impact of place of articulation on voice onset time appears in voiceless stops. VOT values increase as the place of articulation (POA) goes backwards in the vocal cavity. The results of this research show that the following vowel affects VOT in TLA. These results link between longer VOTs and long vowels. The effect of gender has been proved for voiceless plosives in TLA where female subjects produced longer VOTs than males. This dissertation also annotates the differences and similarities between its results and the results of other studies on VOT in other dialects of Arabic as well as VOT in other languages and shows an agreement in the findings with some of the previous literature.