Coarticulation and the synthesis of british English

It has been known for some time that the acoustic parameters of vowels and consonants change as a result oftheimmediate segmental environment (ref 1 & 2); and indeed, it has been claimed that an interconsonantal vowel is imposed on and only slightly modifies a continuous movement from the initial to the final consonants (ref 3). Whatever the extent of such coarticulatory effects, it is reasonable to expect that if we can n1odel them this will contribute to the naturalness of synthesis-by-rule. This paper outlines current work to establish a set of coarticulation rules which are being implemented in the cosegmentation phase of the IBM experimental text-to-speech system (ref 4). We shall concentrate specifically on the analysis of syllable-final stops, which is an extension to the analysis of syllable-initial reported previously (ref 5).