Difficulties of Standard Arabic Phonemes Spoken by Non-Arab Primary School Children based on Formant Frequencies

Abdul-Kadir Abdul-Kadir

doi:10.3844/jcssp.2011.1003.1010

Abstract

Problem statement: The study of Malaysian Arabic phoneme is rarely found which make the references work difficult. Specific guideline on Malaysian subject is not found even though a lot of acoustic and phonetics research has been done on other languages such as English, French and Chinese. Approach: This study discussed about the correct and simplest way of Arabic phonemes pronunciation in Malay accent. The International Phonetic Alphabet of Arabic chart was considered as the reference of every recorded speech samples using Malaysian children for their sound localization (makhraj point) of every alphabet. The recorded sound was analysed to determine the origin of each alphabet data by measuring its formant frequencies. The consonants of Standard Arabic (SA) phonemes were studied and the appropriate place of articulation of every phoneme was measured through its formant. Results: Only seven out of 25 consonants of SA phonemes of the children’s samples did not give the appropriate formants value. The formants are /kof/, [ ?], /zo/, [ ?], /kho/, [ ,[? /gheyn/, [ ?], /ha/, [ ?], /ain/, [ ?] & /ha/, [] which consider as the difficult SA to utter among Malaysian children. Conclusion/Recommendations: The values obtained are used as the reference of the database for our recognition system.

Highlights

Spectrogram is well-known of its representation of visual image of a moving signal
Results show that F2 and F3 can distinguish the place of articulation for front fricative consonants as the formant
The pattern for all of the phonemes is observed in the spectrogram

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Spectrogram is well-known of its representation of visual image of a moving signal. Through a spectrogram, the signal waveform can be interpreted according to its colour distribution, time and frequency. This study is to use the robustness of the spectrogram of each of the signal of SA phonemes to detect the formant frequencies and to study the waveform patterns. The formant frequency, Fn of the phoneme is acquired according to Eq 1 (Fant, 1960; Johnson, 2003; Rabiner and Juang, 1993; Mohd et al, 2009). Plosive is the behaviour of sound produced by magnitude of the spectrum at a certain frequency at stopping the airflow in the mouth Approximant phonemes: Approximant is the manner of articulation which composed of two phonemes of SA Both of these approximant are semivowel, which produced by bringing one articulator (alveolar) in the vocal tract close to another (Fant, 1960; Johnson, 2003; Rabiner and Juang, 1993; Hassan, 1984).

MATERIALS AND METHODS

AND DISCUSSION

Not stated