ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Language- and speaker specific implementation of intonation contours in multilingual TTS synthesis

Boris Lobanov, Liliya Tsirulnik, Dmitry Zhadinets, Helena Karnevskaya

The paper is concerned with the study of final/non-final phrase intonation and its language- and speaker-specific peculiarities. A phrase, according to the model used, is represented by a sequence of accentual units consisting of pre-nucleus, nucleus and post-nucleus. Experimental data obtained from the prosodic analysis of a text, recorded by Russian and Polish native speakers, has made it possible to create accentual unitsÂ’ "portraits" for different types of final/non-final phrase intonation. The implementation of these "portraits" in the unified text-to-speech synthesis system for Slavonic languages with the ability of personal speaking manner cloning is discussed.