Variation in polar interrogative contours within and between Arabic dialects

Quantitative analysis of fundamental frequency (F0) contours in yes/no-questions and coordinated questions, are compared across eight Arabic dialects, based on scripted role play data from the Intonational Variation in Arabic corpus [1]. Visualisation of the F0 contour of all tokens is used to evaluate how consistently speakers produce a typical contour in each dialect, for each question type. A series of simple Generalised Additive Models (GAM) is used to identify dialects which stand out from others in the realization of one or both question types, as well as groups of dialects which might be further differentiated by more fine-grained analysis.