SPEECH SYNTHESIZING DEVICE

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To improve the naturalness of the rhythm of a synthesized speech without taking any complicated language analysis. SOLUTION: A text analysis processing part divides a sentence 40 into paragraphs (42). Then paragraph types (paragraph kind) are determined and used as keys to perform retrieval from a predictive separation degree table 30, and the degrees of predictive separation are given to the paragraphs. A paragraph type is defined with the postpositional particle when the paragraph ending is the postpositional particle, the kind of inflection when the paragraph ending is the inflected word, and the kind of the part of speech when the paragraph is an uninflected word other than the postpositional particle. The degree of predictive separation corresponding to this paragraph type is extracted as statistical properties from many sample sentences and stored previously in the predictive separation degree table 30 (46). The degree of predictive separation is corrected when necessary according to a correction rule based upon the mutual relation between paragraphs obtained by observing a natural speech and the degree of separation is determined.