Modelling of Arabic Plosive and Fricative Acoustic Characteristics Articulated by Malay Native Speakers

This study aims to examine the pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized Arabic sounds produced by Malay speakers based on acoustic phonetic approach and to investigate its relation with the second language learning model proposed by Flege (1995). The plosive and fricative associated with the pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized of Arabic sounds is one of the main problems among non-Arabic native speakers in learning Arabic language. Recent studies emphasize the influence of the first language / mother tongue language as the cause of the failure to master the Arabic language as the second language. Hence the frameworks of the similar, different and new sound hypotheses proposed by Flege (1995) were used to get the real picture of the Arabic language speech phenomenon in the second language condition. PRAAT software was used to obtain speech data in the spectrogram and to undergo spectrograph analysis. Subsequently, the findings were analyzed using SPSS to highlight the overall results of the study more thoroughly. VOT (Voice Onset Time) acoustic parameters for the plosive sound and frication of the frication sounds were used during the spectrograph analysis. A total of 2880 spectrogram data were obtained from the subjects: 24 undergraduates from the Bachelor of Islamic Studies with Honors (Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilization) UKM. The results of the production experiment show that Malay plosive sound has negative VOT for voiced stop and short positive VOT for voiceless stop, while Arabic plosive sounds has a model pattern voicing lead versus long lag for voiced and voiceless stops respectively. The results show that Arabic voiceless stop / ت / is aspirated and found to has a longer VOT than Malay voiceless stop /t/. For Arabic pharyngealized sounds, the results show higher values of F1 than non-pharyngealized sounds. In addition, Arabic pharyngealized sounds are found to have shorter VOT than non-pharyngealized Arabic sounds. The findings showed that there were cases where subjects managed to replicate the L2 sound to similar sound of L1 and there were cases of L2 sounds that are foreign to the sound system of L1. With that in mind, it can be emphasized that some studies have supported Flege’s theory that the similar sound between L1 and L2 are not necessarily easy to pronounce, while there are L2 phonemes that are absent in L1, but they are easily learnt by the L2 speaker.