gibbon09@interspeech_2009@ISCA

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#1 Prosodic issues in synthesising thadou, a tibeto-burman tone language [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Dafydd Gibbon, Pramod Pandey, D. Mary Kim Haokip, Jolanta Bachan

The objective of the present analysis is to present linguistic constraints on the phonetic realisation of lexical tone which are relevant for the choice of a speech synthesis development strategy for a specific type of tone language. The selected case is Thadou (Tibeto-Burman), which has lexical and morphosyntactic tone as well as phonetic tone displacement. The last two constraint types differ from those in more well-known tone languages such as Mandarin, and present problems for mainstream corpus-based speech synthesis techniques. Linguistic and phonetic models and a microvoice for rule-based tone generation are developed.