SENTENCE INTONATION PROCESSING METHOD FOR VOICE SYNTHESIZING DEVICE

摘要

PURPOSE:To obtain a synthesized voice having an intonation approximating a human voice by determining a breath position in accordance with boundaries of clauses and phrases of a text and adding the expiratory intonation determined based on the breath position to a fundamental intonation and word accents to obtain a sentence intonation. CONSTITUTION:A sentence analyzer 5b refers to a grammar dictionary 6 and a word dictionary 7 to perform the sentence analysis of a Japanese-language input text such as clause division and phrase division and obtains boundaries of clauses and phrases and the number of syllables of each boundary with respect to the sentence divided to clauses and phrases and determines a breath position in the sentence in accordance with these boundaries and numbers of syllables. An expiratory intonation which has a logarithmic characteristic having the breath position and the number of syllables as the start point and the end point respectively is generated and is superposed on the fundamental intonation and word accents and a pause or the like is added to obtain metrical information of one sentence. Thus, a natural voice is synthesized.