Acoustic And Articulatory Analysis Of The Gemination In Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

In this paper, we report the results of an experimental study of the acoustic and articulatory properties of the geminate consonants in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). To extract the feature characteristics, we have carried out an acoustic analysis by computing the values of frequency formants, energy and durations of the consonants and subsequent vowels in the various [VCV] and [VCgV] utterances (Cg: geminate consonant). For that, we have used the sonagraph CSL 4300B of Kay Elemetrics, Praat speech analysis software and Matlab Software. For the articulatory analysis tool, we have used the Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulograph EMA AG100 to track and record tongue movements during speech production. A range of kinematics parameters were analyzed from the phoneme productions including movement trajectories, distance, velocity, and duration of tongue movements. We have used also the Carstens Emalyse software to visualize and analyze the measurement data acquired by the Articulograph AG100 and corresponding to the various movements of the tongue tip (TT), tongue mid (TM), and tongue back (TB). Among the most important results, we note a longer duration of the vowel following a geminate consonant, a decreasing in levels of F1 and F2 formants and a rising in level of F3 formant of this vowel.