ETRW on Speaker Characterization in Speech Technology Edinburgh, Scotland, UK June 26-28, 1990

Timing Invariance in Read Speech

W. Nick Campbell

Edinburgh University, Centre for Speech Technology Research, Edinburgh, UK

An experiment is reported that studies the inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability of timing in speech. Twelve speakers were instructed to read a short passage from a popular magazine twice each; once at a slower reading speed and once at a faster rate of articulation. Comparisons of the durational characteristics of the readings were performed at the syllable level.

One more 'reading' was included in a second stage of the experiment, to compare the output from a computer text-to-speech system with that of the human performers. Timings are compared and show that the durations predicted by the computer-speech system fall within the variance observed in the performance of the human readers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Campbell, W. Nick (1990): "Timing invariance in read speech", In SCST-1990, 78-82.