A speech information processing apparatus which sets the duration of
phonological series with accuracy, and sets a natural phoneme duration in
accordance with phonemic/linguistic environment. For this purpose, the
duration of a predetermined unit of phonological series is obtained based
on a duration model for an entire segment. Then, duration of each of
phonemes constructing the phonological series is obtained based on a
duration model for a partial segment. Then, duration of each phoneme is
set based on the duration of the phonological series and the duration of
each phoneme.