European Conference on Speech Technology Edinburgh, Scotland, UK September 1987

Word Intelligibility of a Rule Synthesis System for French

Louis C. W. Pols (1), Jean-Paul Lefevre (2), Gerard Boxelaar (1), Nic van Son (1)

(1) Inst. of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
(2) OROS, Chemin des Pres, Meylan, France

In order to evaluate the quality of the "building blocks" in a diphone-based rule synthesis system for the French language, a listening test was designed to measure the intelligibility of all diphones. Several sets of nonsense words of the type CVVC and VCCV (C=consonant, V = vowel) were presented to 8 native French listeners for identification. As a reference, a subset of LPC-resynthesized words was presented as well. A PC-based listening facility was developed for efficient testing. The results of this intelligibility experiment allow for diagnostic evaluation.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Pols, Louis C. W. / Lefevre, Jean-Paul / Boxelaar, Gerard / Son, Nic van (1987): "Word intelligibility of a rule synthesis system for French", In ECST-1987, 1179-1182.