A Welsh speech database: preliminary results.
Date
1999Author
Williams, Briony
Metadata
Abstract
A speech database for Welsh was recorded in a studio
from read text by a few speakers. The purpose is to
investigate the acoustic characteristics of Welsh speech
sounds and prosody. It can also serve as a resource for
future work in speech synthesis and recognition.
The speech is labelled by hand at the acoustic phonetic
level, and labelled semi-automatically at the phoneme,
syllable, and word levels. Statistical analysis of the
database resolves some long-standing questions in the
phonetics of Welsh stress, and yields more data on
Welsh speech sounds. The overall procedure could be
useful for work on other minority languages where very
little basic acoustic phonetic research has yet been done.