Frontal Arabic Fricative Consonants Characteristics among Primary School Children: Spectral Density Function Approach

Abdul-Kadir Abdul-Kadir

doi:10.3844/jcssp.2011.1590.1595

Abstract

Problem statement: Arabic speech recognition system is un-developed until today. By using people of non-Arab nationality, the set of frontal fricative of Arabic consonants are study as the earlier step to develop the recognition system for Malaysian. As most of the developed Arabic speech recognition system for Malaysian are rarely found. Approach: The characteristic of each of the phonemes were study based on its spectral density function. The considerations were the peak and bandwidth of each consonant speech samples which appear in the spectrum. The total of each character was averaged to get the reliable reference value which will be the baseline for the selected database later. Results: The results showed that the bandwidth consideration of the first peak gave the increment value as the consonants distributed from outer part (labiodentals-3.6 kHz) to inner part of the mouth (alveolar-3.8 kHz). While the peak appearance is lowered as the group of the consonants moved further towards into the mouth. Conclusion/Recommendations: The values obtained were used as the reference of the database for our recognition system. Only suitable consonants samples were chosen to be stored as database to improve the system accuracy.

Highlights

The common method to distinguish the speech samples are spectrogram reading which proved to be the In Arabic speech, fricative is the major group which composed of 13 consonants as followed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system
By using non-native children as the subject, this study study about the characteristics of frontal fricative consonants through power spectral density
The second and the third peaks always appeared greater than the first peak for each consonant of each place of articulation

Summary

Introduction

The common method to distinguish the speech samples are spectrogram reading which proved to be theIn Arabic speech, fricative is the major group which composed of 13 consonants as followed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Arab). The amplitude of spectral peak decrease as the place of articulation moves further forward into the mouth while the bandwidth becomes wider.

Results

Conclusion