another Iraqi vowel fragment

I happened to be listening to archives of the CBC’s Dispatches and came across another nice instance of English #sCC as pronounced by someone whose native language is presumably Iraqi Arabic (see Eric’s post about street and various follow-ups).

Naseer Shamma, an Iraqi oud player living in Egypt (at the time of the interview, at least), talks about the power of music on the April 9 edition of the show’s 2002-2003 season.

Here are a waveform and spectrogram of the word strong:

I thought this case was of interest because strong‘s main vowel [ɔ] is more different from the epenthetic vowel ([ɨ] or so) than is street‘s main vowel [i]. It seems even clearer in Shamma’s utterance that the vowel between [s] and [t] is not the main vowel peeking through.