Analysis and synthesis of glottalization phenomena in German-accented English

The present paper investigates the analysis and synthesis of glottalization phenomena in German-accented English. Word-initial glottalization was manually annotated in a subset of a German-accented English speech corpus. For each glottalized segment, time-normalized F0 and log-energy contours were produced and principal component analysis was performed on the contour sets in order to reduce their dimensionality. Centroid contours of the PC clusters were used for contour reconstruction in the resynthesis experiments. The prototype intonation and intensity contours were superimposed over non-glottalized word-initial vowels in order to resynthesize creaky voice. This procedure allows the automatic creation of speech stimuli which could be used in perceptual experiments for basic research on glottalizations.