Glottalization in inventory construction: a cross-language study

In this paper we present the study of glottalization in three languages: Mandarin Chinese, English and German. The motivation for this study originally comes from the selection of inventory speaker for Mandarin Chinese, and the design of phoneset for English and German synthesis. Because glottalization is characterized with a discontinuity in fundamental frequency, which can degrade the quality of synthesis during pitch manipulation of a concatenative synthesis, we thus investigated the common phenomenon of glottalization in these languages, with the focus on Mandarin Chinese. We illustrated the contexts where it often occurs and propose the implication to deal with glottalization in inventory building for concatenative speech synthesis.