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This study is based on the theoretical premise that space shapes language use and that the interaction between language and space is subject to a social stratification built on gender. The Arabic variety of Ksar el Kebir, which is focused on here, presents a linguistic peculiarity, namely the absence of the opposition of vowel quantity. This characteristic, which developed during centuries because of historical, demographic, social specificities, and language contact, is not shared by the other Arabic varieties spoken in Morocco. However, strongly influenced by the prestigious Standard Arabic, the educated informants perceive an opposition of duration between vowels. This study explores, on the one hand, the gender differences in the perception of Moroccan lexemes, and on the other hand, the emergence of this distinction and its development during the primary and secondary school levels. The targeted population here is composed of 96 informants aged between 7 and 18, living in Ksar el Kebir, 48 girls and 48 boys, half of them living in the city center, and the other half in a new district in the suburbs. The informants had either primary or secondary education level, with 8 informants of the same age per level, 4 girls and 4 boys. Two lists of Moroccan Arabic lexemes of identical syllabic structure have been used as support for the test of perception [C1a1–C2a2], which after acoustic analysis, did not present any difference in vowel duration. Out of a total of 1920 lexemes and 3840 transcribed vowels, 1422 lexemes were perceived as including one or two long vowels [a:], i.e., 74%. The lexemes which were properly perceived represented 498, i.e., 25.9% of the total. The results reveal that, given the stimuli which contain no quantity opposition, the informants reconstruct mentally this contrast. Girls were more prompt to perceive the contrast of quantity as early as the first grades in primary school. The perception gap of more than 30% between the two sexes is maintained during almost the whole period of schooling.
