By means of a pair comparison test, preferences of German native speakers for English or German sounds in spoken anglicisms were investigated. The collected data can be used as a reference point, which of the English xenophones have to be integrated into a German TTS system to allow for an appropriate pronunciation of anglicisms in German.

In most languages, the quality of a speech synthesis system relates directly to the diversity of language domain. Each domain, such as sports, entertainments, etc., has its specific grammar structures. The grammar structure plays as an important role for analyzing the prosodic information of utterances in each domain. In this research, we will analyze characteristics of prosodic information of ...

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Speech Synthesizers have traditionally been built on carefully read speech that is recorded in studio environment. Such voices are suboptimal for use in noisy conditions, which is inevitable in a majority of deployed speech systems. In this work, we attempt to modify the output of the speech synthesizers to make it more appropriate for noisy environments. Comparison of spectral and prosodic fea...

During interpersonal conversation, both children and adults adapt the basic acoustic-prosodic features of their speech to converge with those of their conversational partner. In this study, 7-to-10year-old children interacted with a conversational interface in which animated characters used text-to-speech output (TTS) to answer questions about marine biology. Analysis of children’s speech to di...

This paper introduces a new concept in speech synthesisers by constructing devices and methods by which they can be operated in real-time. Further development of this concept may lead to an improvement in the conversational capabilities of people with ‘speech communicators’. This paper outlines the current limitations of such systems and then describes the methods used to give the user real-tim...

It is tempting for those in the field of organic synthesis to liken the process of retrosynthesis to a game of chess. That the world chess champion was recently defeated by a computer leads us to think that perhaps new and powerful computing methods could be applied to synthetic problems. Here the analogy between synthesis and chess is outlined. Achievements in the 35-year history of computer-a...

This study investigates F0 declination as a global-level prosodic phenomenon, establishing a new discourse-based model of prosodic structure in Japanese. The model includes two levels of declination in a hierarchical order: utterance units and prosodic paragraphs, a higher level of declination consisting of embedded declinations. Comparing and contrasting three types of discourse -read speech, ...