Phoneme dependency of accuracy rates in familiar and unknown speaker identification

J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 120, No. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 3291-3292, 2006

Phoneme dependency of accuracy rates in familiar and unknown speaker identification

K. Amino, T. Arai and T. Sugawara

Abstract: For perceptual speaker identification, the identification accuracy depends on the speech contents presented to subjects. Our previous studies have shown that stimuli containing nasals are effective for identifying familiar speakers [Amino et al., Acoust. Sci. Tech. 27(4) (2006)]. We have also presented the possibility that the interspeaker spectral distances reflect perceptual speaker similarities. In the present study, we conducted an experiment in which four unknown speakers were identified by 15 subjects. The stimuli were identical to those used in the previous study, in which ten speakers were identified by familiar listeners, although the speakers were fewer this time. Nine consonants in the CV structure were used as stimuli. The consonants were /d/, /t/, /z/, /s/, /r/, /j/, /m/, /n/, and /nj/; the vowel was restricted to /a/ for all CV syllables to simplify the experiment. The results showed that the nasals /n/ and /nj/ obtained higher scores. Tendencies in the differences among consonants were on the same order as those of the previous experiment, but the average scores were lower than those for familiar listeners. [Work supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows 17-6901.]

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