A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL FOR A TEXT-TO-SPEECH TRANSLATOR IN ITALIAN

We shall describe the computer programme for the automatic translation of any text of Italian into naturally fluent speech, or Phonological Processor (FP), which is used to guide a speech synthesizer. The FP maps into prosodic structures the phonological rules of Italian. Structural information is provided by such hierarchical prosodic 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, rules indicating secondary stress, external sandhi rules, phonological focus assignment, logical focus assignment. 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: i.e. the FP simulates the operations carried out by an Italian speaker when reading aloud any text.