Acoustical comparison between voiced and voiceless Arabic phonemes of Malay speakers

Arabic phonemes can be categorized as voiced and voiceless with each phoneme has a different articulation manner according to the corresponding vowel. In addition, Arabic language comprises of six vowels. Hence, in this paper, a comparison within each vowel between the voiced and voiceless Arabic phonemes is conducted. The experiments are based on Malay speakers. In total, 1433 tokens are recorded from eight Malay subjects. Firstly, the tokens are processed to extract the first and the second formants (F1 and F2) by utilizing PRAAT platform. Next, the measurements in Hz and then converted into Bark for proper representation in the vowel-space. The phonemes are represented in a vowel-space with horizontal axis referred to F2 and vertical axis referred to F1. The experimental results demonstrated that the voiced phonemes are higher than the voiceless. In contrast, the phonemes tended to show more variety in terms of front and back positions. Results showed that long voiced vowels /a:/ and /i:/ are higher than their short vowels, whilst vowel /u/ tended to be higher than /u:/. In other words, all long voiceless vowels demonstrated higher than the short voiceless vowels.