Acceptability of temporal variations in synthetic speech: a preliminary investigation

Speech production measurements have revealed many regularities in the time domain . The literature has focussed on systematic variations in vowel durations , as these are most likely to carry perceptually relevant information . Yet, not much attention has been paid to the actual relevancy of vowel duration variations to speech perception. It is our hypothesis that the complex system of temporal regularities present in speech production can be reduced to a more general, limited set of rules to be used in speech synthesis, which will prove to be equally acceptable in speech perception . An experiment has been set up to test the influence of temporal variations in the vowel /a:/ in isolated, diphone-concatenated words, depending on the postvocalic consonant, syllabic structure of the word and presence or absence of accent. Results show that a limited set of rules can be used to generate acceptable synthetic speech .