Acoustic analysis of Arabic phonemes based-/a/ vowel

Formants characteristics help to investigate the proper articulation manner of vowels. Arabic phonemes articulation based on the vowel /a:/ is addressed in this paper. The investigation based on Arabic phonemes uttered by Malay speakers. In total, 8 Malay subjects are involved to record 224 tokens of Arabic phonemes based the vowel /a:/. Each subject is given one chance to utter the phonemes. The recording process is achieved by using SAMSON C03U USB multi-pattern condenser microphone. Audacity 2.0.3 software is used as a platform for recording. The speech analysis software PRAAT is conducted to accomplish the pre-processing to reduce the noise using Spectral subtraction technique. Then formant frequencies (F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5) are measured for each phoneme. F1 and F2 are utilised to determine the phoneme location in the vowel-space. Formant frequencies are used also to measure the statistical values such as mean, range and standard deviation. The phonemes representation in the vowel-space revealed two mean values in the central-mid position. This is justified that the speakers pronounce some phonemes as /a:/ and some other phonemes utter it as /a/.