The objective of the present analysis is to present linguistic constraints on the phonetic realisation of lexical tone which are relevant for the choice of a speech synthesis development strategy for a specific type of tone language. The selected case is Thadou (Tibeto-Burman), which has lexical and morphosyntactic tone as well as phonetic tone displacement. The last two constraint types differ from those in more well-known tone languages such as Mandarin, and present problems for mainstream corpus-based speech synthesis techniques. Linguistic and phonetic models and a microvoice for rule-based tone generation are developed.
Cite as: Gibbon, D., Pandey, P., Haokip, D.M.K., Bachan, J. (2009) Prosodic issues in synthesising thadou, a tibeto-burman tone language. Proc. Interspeech 2009, 500-503, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-185
@inproceedings{gibbon09_interspeech,
author={Dafydd Gibbon and Pramod Pandey and D. Mary Kim Haokip and Jolanta Bachan},
title={{Prosodic issues in synthesising thadou, a tibeto-burman tone language}},
year=2009,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2009},
pages={500--503},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2009-185}
}