Resyllabification in indian languages and its implications in text-to-speech systems

Resyllabification is a phonological process in continuous speech in which the coda of a syllable is converted into the onset of the following syllable, either in the same word or in the subsequent word. This paper presents an analysis of resyllabification across words in different Indian languages and its implications in Indian language text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems. The evidence for resyllabification is evaluated based on the acoustic analysis of a read speech corpus of the corresponding language. This study shows that the resyllabification obeys the maximum onset principle and introduces the notion of prominence resyllabification in Indian languages. This paper finds acoustic evidence for total resyllabification. The resyllabification rules obtained are applied to TTS systems. The correctness of the rules is evaluated quantitatively by comparing the acoustic log-likelihood scores of the speech utterances with the original and resyllabified texts, and by performing a pair comparison (PC) listening test on the synthesized speech output. An improvement in the log-likelihood score with the resyllabified text is observed, and the synthesized speech with the resyllabified text is preferred 3 times over those without resyllabification.