A Study of the Building Blocks in Speech

Identification of the information‐bearing elements of speech is important in applying recent thinking on information theory to speech communication. One way to study this problem is to select groups of building blocks and use them to form standardized speech which then may be evaluated; a method having the advantage of simplicity is described. Individual recordings of the building blocks were made on magnetic tape and then various pieces of tape were joined together to form words. Experiments indicated that speech based upon one building block for each vowel and consonant not only sounds unnatural but is mostly unintelligible because the influences on vowel and consonants are missing which ordinarily occur between adjacent speech sounds. To synthesize speech with reasonable naturalness, the influence factor should be included. Here these influences can be approximated by employing more than one building block to represent each linguistic element and by selecting these blocks properly, taking into account ...