Assimilation and deletion phenomena involving word-final /n/ and word-initial /p, t, k/ in Modern Greek: A codification of the observed variation intended for use in TTS synthesis

The present paper is a preliminary attempt to codify assimilation and deletion phenomena in Modern Greek involving the word-final /n/ of certain high-frequency function words and the word-initial voiceless stop (/p/, /t/ or /k/) of the following word. In natural speech, every relevant phoneme combination affected by these post-lexical phonological processes will generate one phonetic realisation from a set of legitimate variants. The variants' distribution is not random but subject to both linguistic and extralinguistic conditions. This work also explores possible ways to exploit the findings of recent sociolinguistic research on Modern Greek with a view to accommodating the observed variation and the rules codifying it within the framework of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Such a development is expected to improve synthetic speech output, both in terms of naturalness and intelligibility.