A demisyllable inventory for speech synthesis

English syllables can be treated as a syllable core, decomposable into initial and final demisyllables, plus optional word‐final phonetic affixes (e.g., /s,z,t,d,θ/) [Lovins and Fujimura, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, S75 (A) (1976)]. An inventory of 835 demisyllables, five phonetic affixes, and 100 reduced‐vowel units (CV or VC syllables) has been prepared in the form of LPC parameters. This inventory allows us to generate any of the ten thousand possible English syllables. An initial demisyllable is composed of an initial consonant or cluster, plus a fixed‐length segment which includes the CV transition; a final demisyllable contains the major portion of the syllable nucleus, plus postnuclear consonant(s). We have found it generally appropriate to produce “tense” or “long” syllabic nuclei by concatenations such as /Cɪ−/ + /−iyC/ For stressed syllables, this allows a reduction of the set of initial demisyllable vowels to /ɪ,ɛ,ae,a,ʌ,ɔ,ᴜ/. Final demisyllables distinguish all fifteen nuclei. Only two spectral smo...