Arabic Vowels Acoustic Characterization

International audienceA sentence is constructed using basic word units. Each word is composed of syllables and each syllable being composed of phonemes, which in turn, can be classified as vowels or consonants. Vowels may occupy the center or nucleus of a syllable, as opposed to consonants, which occur in marginal positions in a syllable (onsets and codas).Vowels appear early in speech development and are central to understanding the acoustic properties of speech. The aim of this work is to enrich the automatic speech recognition system, by the classification of Arabic vowels based on normalized energy in the formant frequency bands

Energy distribution in formant bands for arabic vowels

The acoustic cues play a major role in speech segmentation phase; the extraction of these indexes facilitates the characterization of the speech signal. In this work, we aim to study Arabic vowels (/a/, /a:/, /i/, /i:/, /u/ and /u:/), especially the long ones. We are interested in characterizing this type of vowels in terms of time, frequency and energy. The cues extracted and analyzed in this work are: segment length, voicing degree and formants values

An Acoustic comparison of vowel length contrasts in standard Arabic, Japanese and Thai

In our earlier perception study, we observed that familiarity with first language (L1) phonemic length contrasts in Japanese does not transfer optimally into an unknown language, Arabic. We hypothesized that this finding is related to cross-language differences in how vowel length contrasts are phonetically realized. The present study compares vowel length contrasts that are phonemic in three typologically unrelated languages, i.e., Standard Arabic, Japanese and Thai, in an attempt to understand the extent to which vowel length contrasts are similar or dissimilar in these languages. Acoustic measurements showed short and long categories were clearly differentiated in all three languages and the short-to-long ratio did not substantially differ across languages. This suggests that listeners attend to more than just acoustic vowel duration in making perceptual judgments on short vs. long vowels.4 page(s