Synthesis By Rule as a Tool for Phonological Research
The phonologist, having analysed a corpus of phonetic data and proposed tentative phonological rules, must test these rules by generating novel utterances for acceptance or rejection by an informant. There are certain methodological problems in such testing which could be avoided by the use of speech synthesized by rule. Synthesis by rule is now a practical technique, and a synthesis-by-rule system at Haskins Laboratories has been used to formulate rules for General American English.
A simple program for synthesizing British English
A procedure for synthesizing British English has been developed which incorporates certain economies at little apparent cost in intelligibility, and introduces some rules for allophones which improve quality. Tests are reported with intelligibility around 90 percent, and improvements suggested for the major sources of errors. The assumptions in the procedure for synthesizing speech by rule both summarize and suggest research on fundamental aspects cf speech, and thus constitute a model for some aspects of speech production and speech perception.
Speech Synthesis by Rule Controlled by a Small, Low‐Speed Digital Computer
Computer synthesis of speech by rule has already been demonstrated by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, using a large high‐speed computer to perform the entire process. This paper describes a way of achieving a similar result by the use of a small computer, in conjuction with a moving‐resonance speech synthesizer. The computer program is fairly simple, and consists of instructions for interpreting a table of phoneme data that has been previously fed into the computer store. The sequence of phonemes corresponding to the speech required, together with associated larynx frequencies, is then fed in from a punched tape. Durations are not specified separately, but are calculated from the tables; however, if variations of duration, intensity, or other properties are required to produce variations of stress, etc., additional characters may be added immediately prior to any phoneme symbol. These characters cause the stored table of properties to be modified for that one occurrence of the associated phone...