Understanding the Effect of Voice Quality and Accent on Talker Similarity

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to study the role of nonnative accents on talker recognition by humans. The methodology combines a state-of-the-art accent-conversion system to resynthesize the voice of a speaker with a different accent of her/his own, and a protocol for perceptual listening tests to measure the relative contribution of accent and voice quality on speaker similarity. Using a corpus of nonnative and native speakers, we generated accent conversions in two different directions: non-native speakers with native accents, and native speakers with non-native accents. Then, we asked listeners to rate the similarity between 50 pairs of real or synthesized speakers. Using a linear mixed effects model, we find that (for our corpus) the effect of voice quality is five times as large as that of non-native accent, and that the effect goes away when speakers share the same (native) accent. We discuss the potential significance of this work in earwitness identification and sociophonetics.

Voice disguise and foreign accent: Prosodic aspects of English produced by Bra-zilian Portuguese speakers

“…Concerning the L2 prosody acquisition, phonetic literature has laid down on the use of acoustic features for promoting some nativelikeness degree in L2 speech production and perception, and this includes duration, F0 and intensive features as mentioned by Fletcher (2010), andJackson andO'Brien (2011). Yet, Nooteboom (1997), Wrembel (2007), Levis (2018) and Das et al (2020) spotlight the relevance of voice quality and its interaction with rhythmic and intonational aspects in the recognition of a foreign accent.…”

Automatic Collection of Transcribed Speech for Low Resources Languages

“…It has more than English speech from 1,166 speakers, with pre-built language models and data for training language models. L2-ARCTIC [10] is used by many works [5], [6], [11]- [13]. It is an English database with foreign speakers from 5 different languages using the CMU-ARCTIC [14] as stimuli.…”