14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
Danish has a distinctive vowel length opposition which is realized with little differences in vowel qualities. This paper evaluates the concept of synthesizing short vowels from the corresponding long vowels. Different strategies for synthesizing the short vowels from their long counterpart were tested. The first strategy used the original (homogeneous) time-scaling technique built into the signal generation module, the second relied on a new (steady state) time-scaling algorithm. The two time-scaling strategies for synthesizing short vowels from their long counterparts, were compared to using pre-recorded short vowels in a comprehensive listening test. As a reference for the intelligibility score, a set of identical natural stimuli were included. The results showed a great deviation in intelligibility. The steady state time-scaling algorithm reduced the error rate by 50%, but still introduced a significant reduction in intelligibility compared to pre-recorded short vowels.
Bibliographic reference. Andersen, Ove / Dyhr, N.-J. / Nielsen, C. (1999): "On synthesizing Danish short vowels", In ICPhS-14, 2291-2294.