Differential effects of the phonemes on identification of previously unknown speakers

Abstract

In perceptual speaker identification, it is known that the identification accuracy depends on the contents of the stimuli presented to the listeners. In our previous experiments, we found that the stimuli containing a nasal sound are effective for human speaker identification, and that coronal sounds are more effective than labial ones. This tendency was observed in the identifications of both familiar and previously unknown speakers. In this present study, we investigated the effects of the speech contents again, by focusing on the vowels in CV monosyllabic stimuli. Through the experiment we obtained several findings: 1) stimuli containing a nasal gained significantly higher accuracy compared to stimuli with only oral sounds; 2) coronal sounds were more effective than labial sounds; 3) palatalisation caused an improvement in performance; and 4) back vowels were more effective than front vowels significantly. These results can be explained by speaker-specific morphologies of the nasal cavity and the paranasal sinuses, and also of the pharyngeal cavity. We will also show analyses and discussions on the acoustical properties of the stimuli and the performance differences among the subjects. [Work supported by Sophia University Open Research Centre from MEXT.]