A method of separating high-level prosodic behavior from purely articulatory constraints so that timing information can be extracted from human speech is presented. The extracted timing information is used to construct duration templates that are employed for speech synthesis. The duration templates are constructed so that words exhibiting the same stress pattern will be assigned the same duration template. Initially, the words of input text segmented into phonemes and syllables, and the associated stress pattern is assigned. The stress assigned words are then assigned grouping features by a text grouping module. A phoneme cluster module groups the phonemes into phoneme pairs and single phonemes. A static duration associated with each phoneme pair and single phoneme is retrieved from a global static table. A normalization module generates a normalized syllable duration value based upon the retrieved static durations associated with the phonemes that comprise the syllable. The normalized syllable duration value is stored in a duration template based upon the grouping features associated with that syllable. To produce natural human-sounding prosody in synthesized speech, the duration information is then extracted from the selected template, de-normalized and applied to the phonemic information. <IMAGE>
Generation and synthesis of prosody templates