Title :
Is it a specific vocal tract shape in order to pronounce emphatics?
Author :
AlDahri, Sulaiman S. ; Almanjoomi, Majed K. ; Seddiq, Yasser M. ; Al-Otaibi, S.N. ; Alotaibi, Yousef A.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Eng., King Saud Univ., Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Abstract :
Emphatic phonemes are an important and unique subset of Arabic phonemes. These phonems are difficult to pronounce especially for non-native Arabic speakers and for many normally-educated Arabs. In Arabic, all emphatic phonemes have their own non-emphatic counterparts. In this work, acoustic analysis for the four pairs of emphatic/non-emphatic pairs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is carried out. Formant ratios were computed at the beginning, middle, and end of each inspected utterrence, then, the average of these three temporal positions is calculated. These rations indicate specific vocal tract conficguration for emphatic phonemes if they were compared to their non-emphatic counterparts. Formant ratios show clear indication to discriminate between the four phonemes of empathic and non-emphatic counterparts of Arabic with respect to vocal tract.
Keywords :
bioacoustics; speech; speech processing; Arabic phonemes; Modern Standard Arabic; acoustic analysis; emphatic phonemes; formant ratios; temporal positions; utterrence; vocal tract shape; Encoding;
Conference_Titel :
Communication Systems Networks and Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP), 2010 7th International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Newcastle upon Tyne
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-8858-2
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-86135-369-6