Investigating VOTs of Arabic stops /b, k/ with comparisons to other languages

Abstract

Stops are subset of consonant sounds, and they exist in all languages, as the case of Arabic language. Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a very important attribute of stop sounds. VOT can be utilized by human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in case of English. Similarly, VOT can be adopted by digital systems to classify and recognize stop sounds and their carried syllables and words. Focus of the paper is on computing, analyzing, and comparing VOT of two Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Arabic stops, namely /b/ and /k/. This research uses carrier words of type CV-CV-CV where the intended stops are the second stop in the intended carrier word. One of the main paper outcomes is that the VOT is always positive regardless of the stop voicing status. For voiced consonant /b/, the VOT is less than half of its value in unvoiced one. In addition to this, the VOT values different in Arabic dialects. In addition to this, this work gives initial observations about the effects and correlations of emphaticness in Arabic to VOT values. We reported that the emphaticness property reduces the VOT values.