An Acoustic Analysis and Comparison of Two Unique and Almost Identical Arabic Emphatic Phonemes

Arabic has four emphatic phonemes “dhaad” /d?/, “dhaa” /∂?/, “saad” /s?/, and “ttaa” /t?/. These phonemes are a special subset of Arabic language phoneme set and have unique characteristics. Emphatic phonemes are difficult to vocalize especially the /d?/ phoneme. Another emphatic phoneme that shows a high pronunciation and auditory similarity to /d?/ is /∂?/. The similarity between /d?/ and /∂?/ leads to massive confusions even for native Arabic speakers and listeners. In this work, an acoustic analysis for the two identical emphatic phonemes (/d?/ and /∂?/) is performed. Formants difference was calculated at certain interesting time's positions of each phoneme's time domain waveform. The formant's values and difference show obvious dissimilarities between the twophonemes. These dissimilarities are an indication of discrimination in the vocal tract while uttering and/or perceiving of the two phonemes within legal Arabic words.