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Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kuwait, P.O. Box: 5969, Safat, 13060, Kuwait

ABSTRACT

Application of computers to speech analysis, synthesis and recognition stimulated the need to investigate and identity the characteristics of Arabic speech. This paper examines the characteristics of Arabic speech and in particular the analysis of the vowels. The complete phonemes are examined from a large number of references. The relative equivalent of Arabic phonemes to the international phonemes are also studied and tabulated. Keywords containing the vowels were pronounced by several male and female native Arabic speakers, then recorded and analyzed using the sonograph. The formants were extracted manually from the spectrograph of various vowels and categorized. The formant analysis indicates that the Arabic language contains eleven distinctive vowels.