14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Synthesizing French Prosody from a Phonological Representation

Pierre Larrey, Nadine Vigouroux, Guy Pérennou

IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

The work presented here aims to implement a concept-to-speech synthesizer that would allow a dialog manager to make use of prosody to achieve communicative goals. The approach chosen makes use of abstract phonological commands that can drive a context-sensitive prosody. The paper focuses on the phonetic implementation of the prosodic commands to drive a speech synthesizer. Using auditory tests to ensure perceptual equivalence, an intermediate phonetic representation is proposed to reduce the perplexity of the phonetic implementation. This representation permits testing and refining the phonetic and the phonological of the model. Perceptual and statistical results are presented showing the validity of the chosen approach.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Larrey, Pierre / Vigouroux, Nadine / Pérennou, Guy (1999): "Synthesizing French prosody from a phonological representation", In ICPhS-14, 2295-2298.