Acoustic correlates of speaker discrimination in English

This study investigated speaker discrimination in utterances varying in syllable length and speaker gender taken from the TIMIT corpus of American English. Twenty native English speakers presented one-, two-, and three-syllable utterances (within speaker gender) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Perception results were analyzed in light of both source level (F0 and long-term average spectrum of LPC residuals) and formant level measurements (F1–F4). Results showed that male speakers were discriminated better than female speakers. Source features (F0 and LTAS of LPC residuals) significantly predicted listener response, while higher spectral information (F1–F4) had little effect. The varying importance of vocal source and vocal tract characteristics in speaker discrimination is discussed.