A study for the effect of the Emphaticness and language and dialect for Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)
This work addresses pronunciation challenges for less-educated Arabs and non-native speakers by analyzing acoustic features in Arabic, though it is incremental as it applies existing VOT methods to a specific language context.
The study measured Voice Onset Time (VOT) for stop phonemes in Modern Standard Arabic, finding that emphatic sounds like /d?/ and /t?/ have VOT values less than 50% of their non-emphatic counterparts such as /d/ and /t/. It also explored VOT's potential for dialect classification.
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. The pronunciation of these sounds is hard and unique especially for less-educated Arabs and non-native Arabic speakers. VOT can be utilized by the human auditory system to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops such as /p/ and /b/ in English.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.