14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Arabic Vowel Formant Frequencies

Mohammad Al-Anani

Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University of Jordan, Jordan

For most Arabic varieties, the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of Arabic vowels have so far received little attention. For example, the precise number of vocalic units operating in the phonological systems in most varieties of spoken Arabic is still unknown. Important acoustic knowledge about the formant pattern of vocalic units, especially acoustic data relevant for the first two formants is not available. The purpose of this study has therefore been targeted to collection of acoustic data that would provide reliable evidence for scholars and practitioners when describing and comparing formant frequencies of vocalic units. The material of investigation consisted of 64 contrastive CV (V) C words which represent instances containing each of the ten Arabic monophthongs. Paired words were read out onto a bidirectional microphone connected to Micron computer. The software computer programme used was "Dr Speech, Tiger Electronics, Inc.".
   Formant frequencies (F₀, F1, F2, F3) were measured by LPC analysis.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Al-Anani, Mohammad (1999): "Arabic vowel formant frequencies", In ICPhS-14, 2117-2119.