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.
Cite as: Campbell, W.N. (1990) Timing invariance in read speech. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Speaker Characterization in Speech Technology, 78-82
@inproceedings{campbell90_scst,
author={W. Nick Campbell},
title={{Timing invariance in read speech}},
year=1990,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Speaker Characterization in Speech Technology},
pages={78--82}
}