Abstract
Many speech technologies assume that speech can be approximated by time warping and concatenating appropriately selected “speech units”, such as diphones. This paper first discusses evidence for the validity of this assumption, and then points out how modelling of speech timing can be cast in terms of time warp functions; conventional segmental duration based modelling is a special case of time warp function based modelling. Next, the paper addresses a challenge against time warp based modelling: the possible existence of long-range temporal constraints on timing, as proposed by isochrony and syllabic timing concepts. However, evidence is provided that such constraints simply do not exist in American English and Mandarin Chinese. The paper concludes with a presentation of a time warp based approach to pitch modelling.
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van Santen, J.P.H. (1997). Segmental Duration and Speech Timing. In: Sagisaka, Y., Campbell, N., Higuchi, N. (eds) Computing Prosody. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_15
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