A study of Voice Onset Time for Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic

Voice Onset Time (VOT) is an important feature in signal sound. This feature appears only in stop sounds. VOT can be utilized by human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in case of English. Similarly, VOT can be adopted by digital systems to classify and recognize stop sounds and their carried syllables and words. This paper focuses on computing and analyzing VOT of two main standard Arabic languages and comparing them with other languages. These two main standard languages are Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic (CA). We built a database using a carrier word structure of CV-CV-CV. This database was utilized to conduct our experiments. One of the main outcomes of the experiments is that the VOT is always positive regardless of the stop voicing. In addition, we found that the VOT is short for voiced sounds and long for unvoiced sounds. Moreover, the VOT values showed different values for different Arabic dialects.