Contextual effects on voicing profiles of German and Mandarin consonants.
Chilin Shih, Bernd Möbius · 1998
In this paper we present a study of the voicing profiles of consonants in Mandarin Chinese and German. The voicing profile is defined as the frame-by-frame voicing status of a speech sound in continuous speech. We are particularly interested in discrepancies between the phonological voicing status of a speech sound and its actual phonetic realization in connected speech. We further examine the contextual factors that cause voicing variations and test the cross-language validity of these factors. The result can be used to improve speech synthesis, and to refine phone models to enhance the performance of automatic speech segmentation and recognition. 1. INTRODUCTION There is ample documentation in the literature showing that the realization of voicing in many languages is highly variable. The frequent mismatch between phonological specification and acoustic realization in speech leads to complications in speech processing, notably in speech synthesis and speech recognition. Our main fo...