Formant Based Analysis of Spoken Arabic Vowels

In general, speech sounds are classified into two categories: vowels that contain no major air restriction through the vocal tract, and consonants that involve a significant restriction and are therefore weaker in amplitude and often "noisier" than vowels. This study is specifically concerned with modern standard Arabic dialect. Whilst there has been disagreement between linguistics and researchers on the exact number of Arabic vowels that exist, here we consider the case of eight Arabic vowels that comprise the six basic ones in addition to two diphthongs. The first and second formant values in these vowels are investigated and the differences and similarities between the vowels are researched using consonant-vowels-consonant (CVC) utterances. The Arabic vowels are analyzed in both time and frequency domains, and the results of the analysis will facilitate future Arabic speech processing tasks such as vowel and speech recognition and classification