Segmental Re-synthesis of Child Speech Using Unit Selection

This report describes a novel approach to segmental re-synthesis of child speech, by concatenation of speech from different speakers. The re-synthesis builds upon standard methods of unit selection, but instead of using speech from only one speaker, target segments are selected from a speech database of many child speakers. Results from a listener evaluation suggest that the method can be used to generate intelligible speech that is difficult to distinguish from original recordings.