Author

Afaf Al Shalaby, Oumayma Al Dakkak, Nada Ghneim

Published in

International Journal on Media Technology, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to study the acoustic word stress in Arabic. We performed an acoustic analysis based on the three prosody parameters (fundamental frequency, intensity and duration), for a corpus of 100 sentences (about 400 words) in order to detect the stressed syllables. This study is based on our previous syllabification paper, and will help in determining the stress assignment rules for our Arabic Semi-Syllable Synthesizer. We discuss stress assignments on syllables of monosyllabic, disyllabic and polysyllabic words in addition to phrases with liaison cases. The assigned stress can have one of three degrees: primary stress, secondary stress and neutralized (absence of stress). In this paper, we compared the acoustic characteristics of stressed syllables with non-stressed ones. The comparison showed that the duration cue has the most prominent effect followed by intensity. F0 is the less effective cue. The primary stress is assigned to the syllable having long vowels, if not (absence of long vowels) to the syllable containing geminated consonants, otherwise to the heaviest syllable in a word.

Keywords: Acoustic Analysis, Prosody, Speech Corpus, Stress, Syllabification, Arabic Semi-Syllable Synthesizer, Liaison Cases, Primary Stress, Secondary Stress, Neutralized.

Link to read full paper

https://www.praiseworthyprize.org/jsm/index.php?journal=iremt&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=20850