Durational Evidence for Syllable Boundary of /n/ and /l/ in Text-to-Speech Synthesis

The Text-to-Speech (TTS) system does rely on syllable boundary information for segmental duration. However, ambisyllabic consonants always pose a problem to TTS because the system requires clear syllable boundaries to segment and concatenate. In order to provide a possible solution to this problem, /n/ and /l/ in VLCAVR are chosen in this paper as the target to be examined whether their durations behave more like the syllabic onset or coda when comparing with the durational properties of /n/ and /l/ both as onsets in CV and codas in VC. As the syllable boundaries, onset C shows much more sensitivity to stress than coda C while coda C shows more sensitivity to syllabic position than onset C. Moreover, CA in VLCAVR is also influenced by two variables of stress and position as C in CV and VC. The results show that the intervocalic CA holds the properties of both the syllabic onset and coda, which states the possibility that intervocalic consonants should be considered as a rather independent concatenative unit in TTS synthesis.