Modeling duration adjustment with dynamic time warping

Dynamic time warping (DTW) is used to time-align frames in a naturally spoken monosyllabic word-a long-duration syllabic-with the corresponding frames in the same syllable excised from a polysyllabic word-a shorter-duration rendition of the syllable. The DTW path, referenced to the monosyllable, indicates which portions of the monosyllable are shortened (and by how much) to match the shorter version of the syllable in a polysyllabic word. An experiment is presented which indicates that most shortening occurs in the latter portion of the syllable and that DTW path slopes are correlated with a measure of the amount of formant movement in the syllable. For speech synthesis by rule, a formant-movement time function computed for each template in an inventory in combination with additional information like phonemic vowel identity and consonant position within a syllable can define a time-compression function for the template/