Abstract
Humans can identify a particular speaker with considerable ease by fairly short speech segments, but tell with great difficulty which voice information cues the speaker identity. This study investigated if reliable identification of a speaker could be achieved solely by an individual vowel. In this research, ten monophthongs were selected as target vowels for an identification test, and these vowel stimuli were recorded in a /hVd/ word frame. The American, Dutch, and Chinese speakers were identified after each stimulus by native Chinese-speaking listeners. The results of the identification tests showed that in a cross-linguistic setting where both native and non-native speakers of English were identified with English, vowels facilitated the identification. The acoustic analysis also indicated that the higher-frequency formants demonstrated more inter-speaker variability than the lower-frequency formants. Further, the height feature of vowels was more important than the backness feature for cross-linguistic speaker identification. Results also showed that in comparison with non-Chinese speakers, Chinese speakers were better identified by Chinese listeners who shared the same native language with the speakers.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Planning Project (14YJA740036) and the National Social Science Fund of China Post-Financed Project (17FYY009).
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Xu, Y., Wang, H. (2019). Cross-Linguistic Speaker Identification by Monophthongal Vowels. In: Xhafa, F., Patnaik, S., Tavana, M. (eds) Advances in Intelligent, Interactive Systems and Applications. IISA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 885. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02804-6_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02804-6_40
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