Speech Synthesis:
Affricate Consonants

IPA	Description	Examples
t∫	unvoiced	cheap
dʒ	voiced	jeep

Table 8: Affricate consonants.

On page 272 of Normal Aspects of Speech, Hearing and Language, Fred D. Minife describes an affricate as combining “the elements of a stop sound with the elements of a fricative”. Table 8 lists affricates used in English, but Wikipedia lists a total of 16 affricates employed by languages worldwide. Further background may be found in Robert Mannell's page on Affricates

As compounds of already familiar phoneme types, affricates present no new challenges for speech synthesis. The lyrics for “Daisy Bell” include the affricate dʒ, which concludes the word “marriage”. This appears at time 56.00 in Listing 8, which provides a not-so-convincing synthesis solution. Thus demonstrating that the quality of a compound synthesis can be no better than the quality of its components.

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