A Search for Durational Rules in a Real-Speech Data Base

Abstract

Abstract The durational properties of consonants have been studied for Swedish and English. The use of quantity in Swedish demands an expansion of the rule structure proposed by Klatt. The Swedish study has been done in the context of a speech data base of read sentences. There are considerable problems in administering such data bases, both to transcribe and segment the speech and to easily access stored material. We report how speech is transcribed and segmented semiautomatically. The transcription is generated by the text-to-phonetic component of our synthesis system. The same rule structure is used for accessing the data. Durational data is collected and compared to models directly during the data base search.