Cross-Linguistic Speaker Identification by Monophthongal Vowels

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.