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 o f the American English represented in the TIMIT speech database. First we describe some relevant characteristics of TIMIT, and how we use th e 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 informatio n), and one using the audio signal for acoustic analysis. Results of s uch studies should be useful not only to linguistic phoneticians but a lso for speech recognition lexicons and text-to-speech systems.