Applications of computer generated expressive speech for communication disorders

This paper focuses on generation of expressive speech, specifically speech displaying vocal affect. Generating speech with vocal affect is important for diagnosis, research, and remediation for children with autism and developmental language disorders. However, because vocal affect involves many acoustic factors working together in complex ways, it is unlikely that we will be able to generate compelling vocal affect with traditional diphone synthesis. Instead, methods are needed that preserve as much of the original signals as possible. We describe an approach to concatenative synthesis that attempts to combine the naturalness of unit selection based synthesis with the ability of diphone based synthesis to handle unrestricted input domains.