Tape recordings of 24 speakers conversing over an unprocessed channel and over an LPC voice processing system were subjected to listening tests. The listeners were 24 co-workers who attempted to identify each speaker from a group of about 40 people working in the same branch. Prior to the recognition test, each of the listeners also rated his or her familiarity with each of the speakers and the distinctiveness of each speaker’s voice. There was some loss in voice recognition over LPC, but the recognition accuracy was still quite high (69% vs 88% for unprocessed voices), suggesting that frequently voiced concerns about speaker recognition over narrow-band voice communication systems may not be justified. Talker familiarity was significantly correlated with correct identifications. There was no significant correlation between the rated distinctiveness of the speaker and correct identifications. However, familiarity and distinctiveness ratings were highly correlated. This suggests that people consider a familiar voice to be distinctive regardless of whatever characteristics might make that particular voice stand out in a crowd.
This work was supported by NIH Grant NS 20071. We thank Dr. Stephen J. Eady for suggestions.•AII of the spontaneously produced one-clause sentences were identical to their read counterparts or differed only on one or two articles (substituting "the" for "a"). 60% of the two clause spontaneous sentences were identical to the read versions or differed only on articles. In the cases in which the spontaneous and read versions of a sentence were less similar, the differences were minor. In all cases, the syntactic structure and number of content words were equivalent. Sentences formulated by the speakers deviated from the target sentences in three ways: ( 1 ) substitution of a synonymous word for the target word (e.g., "sawing" for "cutting," "combing" for "brushing"), (2) use of an abbreviated form of a word ("paper" for "newspaper," "bike" for "bicycle" ), and (3) interjection of an adjective not included in the target sentence ("drinking Isome[ milk"). 2Aside from the main findings, two other results are noteworthy. First, the initial F0 peaks in the two-clause sentences were somewhat higher on average than the first peaks in the corresponding one-clause sentences. However, this effect was not statistically significant. Second, a small minority of the two-clause utterances exhibited declination resetting, in which the F0 values of the second clause were systematically higher than would be predicted by a single declination function (Cooper and Soremen, 1981 ), yet declining within the clause. The fact that resetting accompanied a relatively small number of utterances here might be attributable to the fact that the individual clauses were usually not very long. When resetting was observed for a two-clause utterance in read speech, it was also observed for the corresponding sentence in spontaneous speech.Breckenridge, J., and Liberman, M. Y. (1977). "The declination effect in perception," unpublished manuscript. (Available from AT&T Bell Laboratories,
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