RA2: Identification of relevant phonetic parameters crucial for the quality of synthetic speech¶

The phonetic reality of speech production is characterized by smooth, continuous movements of articulators. Individual segments change into one another gradually and even abrupt changes (such as the plosion of plosives) are framed in transitions of spectral properties around them. Within RA2 we plan to ascertain the importance of individual contributors to fluent transitions (and their violations) through reliable perceptual testing. Random samples of listeners will provide measures of the impact of transitions in the domain of spectral correlates of nasality, labialization and “palatalizing” influence of [i:] and [j] (RA2a), fundamental frequency (RA2b), and spectral manifestations of stress (RA2c). Synthesized chains of segments with specially designed parameters (varying in degree and type) will be used to test hypotheses about transitions. The experiments will obviously include natural speech samples to provide benchmark measures. A subset of the data will be tested using the word-monitoring paradigm [STU12]; in other words, reaction time measurements will also be used to determine the disturbing effect associated with concatenation.