Cue Weighting in the Perception and Production of English Stop Voicing by Arabic-speaking Learners: Phonological Context and Immediate Post-Instruction Adjustment

This study revisits English stop voicing in Arabic-speaking learners through a design that combines perception, production, phonological context, and a brief instructional manipulation within the same participants. Forty participants took part: 30 Arabic-speaking learners (10 Novice-High, 10 Intermediate-High, and 10 Advanced) and 10 native English controls. Learners completed perception and production pretests, a live standardized mini-lesson, and immediate posttests in the same session; controls completed a matched interval without instruction. Perception cue weighting was estimated with participant-by-time logistic coefficients for voice onset time (VOT), onset F0, and vowel duration. Production analyses were separated into singleton /p/-/b/ contrasts and /sp/ aspiration suppression so that laryngeal category and context were not conflated. Learners underweighted VOT at pretest relative to native controls, with the largest gap in the novice group, and the learner groups showed immediate posttest increases in VOT weighting. Secondary-cue reliance was also proficiency-sensitive: novice and intermediate learners entered with heavier duration weighting, which declined after instruction. In production, learners produced smaller singleton VOT contrasts than native controls and showed persistent difficulty suppressing aspiration in /sp/ onsets, especially at lower proficiency levels. Immediate posttest adjustment was strongest in the same learners who had shown the weakest pretest control. Participant-level correlations linked change in perceptual VOT weight to change in both /sp/ suppression and singleton voiceless VOT. The results are consistent with gradient, shared phonetic restructuring, but the single-session design warrants a cautious interpretation of instruction as short-term adjustment rather than durable learning.