Formant based analysis of emphaticness property in MSA Arabic

Emphatic phonemes are an important and unique subset of Arabic phonemes. These phonemes exist mainly in Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. In Arabic, all emphatic phonemes have their own non-emphatic counterparts. In this work, acoustic analysis for the four pairs of emphatic/non-emphatic pairs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is carried out. The work also includes building a corpus containing the targeted phonemes within well-selected carrier words. The analysis considered the spectral characteristics of the phonemes. Among the investigated characteristics are the ratios between the first, second, and third formants. Formant ratios show good indication to discriminate between the four pairs of emphatic and non-emphatic counterparts of Arabic.