The treatment given to the timing of voicing in three areas of phonetic
research -- phonetic taxonomy, speech production modelling, and speech
synthesis -- Is considered in the light of an acoustic study of the timing of
voicing in British English obstruents. In each case, it is found to be deficient.
The underlying cause is the difficulty in applying a rigid segmental approach to
an aspect of speech production characterised by important inter-articulator
asynchronies, coupled to the limited quantitative data available concerning the
systematic properties of the timing of voicing in languages.
It is argued that the categories and labels used to describe the timing of
voicing In obstruents are Inadequate for fulfilling the descriptive goals of
phonetic theory. One possible alternative descriptive strategy is proposed,
based on incorporating aspects of the parametric organisation of speech into
the descriptive framework. Within the domain of speech production modelling,
no satisfactory account has been given of fine-grained variability of the timing
of voicing not capable of explanation in terms of general properties of motor
programming and utterance execution. The experimental results support claims
In the literature that the phonetic control of an utterance may be somewhat
less abstract than has been suggestdd in some previous reports. A schematic
outline is given, of one way in which the timing of voicing could be controlled
in speech production. The success of a speech synthesis-by-rule system
depends to a great extent on a comprehensive encoding of the systematic
phonetic characteristics of the target language. Only limited success has been
achieved in the past thirty years. A set of rules is proposed for generating
more naturalistic patterns of voicing in obstruents, reflecting those observed in
the experimental component of this study. Consideration Is given to strategies
for evaluating the effect of fine-grained phonetic rules In speech synthesis