PHONETIC ANALYSES OF WORD AND SEGMENT VARIATION USING THE TIMIT-CORPUS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH

This paper reports a set of studies of some phonetic characteristics of the American English represented in the TIMIT speech database. First we describe some relevant characteristics of TIMIT, and how we use the non-speech files on the TIMIT CD with a commercial database program. Two studies are then described: one using only the non-audio parts of TIMIT (segmental transcriptions and durations, and speaker information), and one using the audio signal for acoustic analysis. Results of such studies should be useful not only to linguistic phoneticians but also for speech recognition lexicons and text-to-speech systems.