Detection of stressed syllables in standard Arabic

Most existing algorithms to identify the primary stressed syllable of accented words for the recognition and synthesis of Arabic prosody are based on the fundamental frequency. In this study, we used both formants values and the acoustic parameter of energy by means of a classification by a discriminant analysis to detect the primary stressed syllables of standard Arabic words with the structure [CVCVCV] read by four native speakers (two male and two female). We obtained a percentage of detection equal to 77% of the stressed syllables. These initial results need to be tested on larger corpora but our results suggest this could be a useful addition to existing algorithms, in the goal of improving systems of automatic synthesis and recognition in standard Arabic.