Difficulties of Standard Arabic Phonemes Spoken by Non-Arab Primary School Children based on Formant Frequencies

Abstract

Problem statement: The study of Malaysian Arabic phoneme is rarely found which make the references work difficult. Specific guideline on Malaysian subject is not found even though a lot of acoustic and phonetics research has been done on other languages such as English, French and Chinese. Approach: This study discussed about the correct and simplest way of Arabic phonemes pronunciation in Malay accent. The International Phonetic Alphabet of Arabic chart was considered as the reference of every recorded speech samples using Malaysian children for their sound localization (makhraj point) of every alphabet. The recorded sound was analysed to determine the origin of each alphabet data by measuring its formant frequencies. The consonants of Standard Arabic (SA) phonemes were studied and the appropriate place of articulation of every phoneme was measured through its formant. Results: Only seven out of 25 consonants of SA phonemes of the children’s samples did not give the appropriate formants value. The formants are /kof/, [ ق], /zo/, [ ظ], /kho/, [ ,[خ /gheyn/, [ غ], /ha/, [ ح], /ain/, [ ع] & /ha/, [ه] which consider as the difficult SA to utter among Malaysian children. Conclusion/Recommendations: The values obtained are used as the reference of the database for our recognition system.