gibbon09@interspeech_2009@ISCA

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

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.