Some observations on the processing of mute “e” in a French diphone-based speech synthesis system

Abstract

Based on qualitative experimental observations and the results of intelligibility tests on synthetic speech utterances, this study tries to explain why some of the mute “e” pronunciation rules observed in standard French cannot be replicated with the current version of the CNET diphone-based TTS system without degrading intelligibility. It highlights the necessity of improving the type of speech unit to be stored, in place of diphones, in concatenation-based systems. It also shows that this choice of concatenative unit cannot be adequately made without gaining more knowledge about some scarcely investigated phonetic issues, such as the acoustic correlates of pronounced vs. elided mute “e”.