W̱SÁNEĆ School Board

Published purpose

We will create a text to speech synthesizer (TTS) and verb/root word conjugator for SENĆOŦEN. The development of a TTS provides an opportunity to hugely increase our ability to mobilize many of the resources we have created for our SENĆOŦEN immersion program including read along books, on-line lessons, grammar book, and the ongoing development of a SENĆOŦEN literature. The development of a verb/root word based conjugator for SENĆOŦEN will play a significant role in filling gaps in the availability/accessibility of online language resources such as the grammar developed by our language team with support of Dr. Timothy Montler. TTS synthesis is valuable in this context because it will provide learners access to standard pronunciation of words in environments where immediate access to a fluent speaker may be difficult. Because of the polysynthetic nature of SENĆOŦEN, it is impossible to create separate recordings of every word, whereas appropriately designed TTS synthesizer can produce audio for any words the verb/root word conjugator can generate.