Phonetic investigation of MSA Arabic stops (/t, d/)

Abstract

Stops are subset of consonant sounds and exist in all languages as the case of Arabic language. Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a very important feature of stop sounds in many languages. VOT can be utilized by human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in English. Similarly, VOT can be adopted by digital systems to classify and recognize stop sounds and their carried syllables and word of any languages. This paper focuses on computing, analyzing, and comparing VOT of two Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Arabic language stops, namely /t/ and /d/. The stop /d/ is voiced sound but /t/ is unvoiced. 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. For voiced consonant /d/, the VOT is less than half of its value in unvoiced one. In addition to this, the VOT value of /t/ stop in MSA Arabic dialect is higher from their values in other Arabic dialects and languages.