On syllable duration in Italian

The paper illustrates the results of an experimental analysis of the variations in the duration of tonic-stressed vowels which occur when syllable structure varies, i.e., in checked open syllables and in free close syllables, during in continuousnected speech and in isolated words. The investigation was carried out with the aid of an automatic segmentation phonetic aligner and database querying tools on extensive read-speech corpora produced by two professional speakers, one male and one female. The linguistic unit taken into consideration was the intonational phrase in declarative mood, distinguishing between isolated words, suspensive phrases and conclusive phrases. In these contexts, attention focuses on the position occupied by the tonicstressed vowel in the phrase. The results are of particular interest to the algorithm used for acoustic unit selection to select acoustic units in a new high-quality concatenative text-to-speech synthesis system based on concatenative synthesis technique.