A phonological processor for Italian

Abstract

A computer program for the automatic translation of any text of Italian into naturally fluent synthetic speech is presented. The program, or Phonological Processor (hence FP) maps into prosodie structures the phonological rules of Italian. Structural information is provided by such hierarchical prosodie constituents as Syllable (S), Metrical Foot (MF), Phonological Word (PW), Intonational Group (IG). Onto these structures, phonological rules are applied such as the "letter-to-sound" rules, automatic word stress rules,internal stress hierarchy rules indicating secondary stress,external sandhi rules, phonological focus assignment rules, logical focus assignment rules. The FP constitutes also a model to simulate the reading process aloud, and the psycholinguistics and cognitive aspects related will be discussed in the computational model of the FP . At present, Logical Focus assignment rules and the computational model are work in progress still to be implemented in the FP. Recorded samples of automatically produced synthetic speech will be presented at the conference to illustrate the functioning of the rules.