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Determining Prepausal Lengthening for Finnish Rule-Based Speech Synthesis

Jussi Hakokari, Tuomo Saarni, Tapio Salakoski, Jouni Isoaho, Olli Aaltonen, Determining Prepausal Lengthening for Finnish Rule-Based Speech Synthesis. In: Speech Analysis, Synthesis and Recognition, Applications of Phonetics, 2005.

Abstract:

We are developing a Finnish rule-based TTS system. Our primary
concern is to enhance naturalness in the synthesis by observing
tendencies in natural language and implementing the findings into the
synthesis. We have concentrated on modeling duration, which is essential
to the Finnish language due to contrasting phonemic length and the fact
that the durations of individual phones are highly sensitive to their
position within a word. One of the many durational considerations is
prepausal lengthening. Most languages exhibit lengthening of speech
sounds at the ends of phrases and sentences, but there is no applicable
data available on the phenomenon with regard to Finnish. Data mining a
speech corpus, we have set out to investigate what is the best justified
way to implement prepausal lengthening to a Finnish rule-based TTS
system. The results show that there is considerable lengthening of the
entire prepausal word. Moreover, some of the effects appear to extend to
the penultimate word. The data acquired in the study provides us
adequate information for modeling prepausal lengthening in TTS.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpHaSaSaIsAa05a,
  title = {Determining Prepausal Lengthening for Finnish Rule-Based Speech Synthesis},
  booktitle = {Speech Analysis, Synthesis and Recognition, Applications of Phonetics},
  author = {Hakokari, Jussi and Saarni, Tuomo and Salakoski, Tapio and Isoaho, Jouni and Aaltonen, Olli},
  year = {2005},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Turku BioNLP Group, Communication Systems (ComSys)

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