A Study for the Effect of the Emphaticness and Language and Dialect for Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)

Abstract

The signal sound contains many different features, including Voice Onset Time (VOT), which is a very important feature of stop sounds in many languages. The only application of VOT values is stopping phoneme subsets. This subset of consonant sounds is stop phonemes exist in the Arabic language, and in fact, all languages. Very important subsets of Semitic language's consonants are the Emphatic sounds. The pronunciation of these sounds is hard and unique especially for less-educated Arabs and non-native Arabic speakers. In the Arabic language, all emphatic sounds have their own non-emphatic counterparts that differ only in the " emphaticness " based on written letters. VOT can be utilized by the 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 for words of any language. In addition, an analysis of any language's phoneme set is very important in order to identify the features of digital speech and language for automatic recognition, synthesis, processing, and communication. The main reason to choose this subject is that there is not enough research that analyzes the Arabic language. Also, this subject is new because it will analyze Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and other Arabic dialects. This search focuses on computing and analyzing VOT of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), within the Arabic language, for all pairs of non-emphatic (namely, /d/ and /t/) and emphatic pairs (namely, /d ? / and /t ? /) depending on carrier words. This research uses a database built by ourselves, and uses the carrier words syllable structure: CV-CV-CV. One of the main outcomes always found is the emphatic sounds (/d ? /, /t ? /) are less than 50% of non-emphatic (counter-part) sounds (/d/, /t/).Also, VOT can be used to classify or detect for a dialect ina language.