Third ESCA/COCOSDA Workshop on Speech Synthesis November 26-29, 1998 Jenolan Caves House, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

How a French text-to-speech System can Describe Loanwords

Frédérique Sannier, Véronique Aubergé, Rabia Belrhali

Institut de la Communication Parlée, Grenoble, France

We propose here an approach of the morphophonological treatment of borrowed lexical items in the general French lexicon, through the mecanims of the functionning of the TTS Toph. We will show how the methodology we adopted in this TTS allows us to distinguish two levels of processing, adapted to the nature of the items. After the display of the typology of phonetic transfers we will focus on the inflexional systems of loanwords, taking into account the graphic and the phonetic dimensions. The last part will be dedicated to the phonetic inflected forms generation, which would find applications in concept-to-speech synthesis.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sannier, Frédérique / Aubergé, Véronique / Belrhali, Rabia (1998): "How a French text-to-speech System can Describe Loanwords", In SSW3-1998, 99-104.