Arabic Stop Consonant Acoustic Characterization

Abstract

The present study investigates Arabic stop consonants. Our goal is to give sufficient acoustic cues for detecting and characterizing such consonants. In general, speech is made with sequences of consonants (fricatives, nasals and stops), vowels and glides. The first task is then to separate stop consonants from other phonemes. From an acoustic point of view, stop consonants are characterized by abrupt changes in speech signal. To detect such changes, we exploit landmarks method. The second purpose of this work is to give a relevant characterization of stop consonants by using normalized closure and release durations and computing the spectral moments.