Speech Synthesis and Standard Pronunciation of German

The Institute of Speech Sciences and Phonetics at Halle University is currently working on a new dictionary of German pronunciation, including the development of a “talking dictionary”. This development is done in cooperation with the Laboratory of Acoustics and Speech Communication at Dresden University of Technology. For this purpose a preliminary study was conducted, using a high-quality speech synthesis system (Dresdner Speech Synthesis DRESS). The most recent version of synthetic speech, derived from the new corpus, has been evaluated by experts and laypersons with regard to adherence and closeness to norms of pronunciation. The results show that deviations between spoken and synthesized utterances of standard pronunciation of single words occur with respect to several phonetic features.