Effects of linguistic contents on perceptual speaker identification: Comparison of familiar and unknown speaker identifications1

Abstract: There are several factors that affect human speaker recognition. In this study, two experiments were conducted in order to see the effects that the stimulus contents and the familiarity to the speakers give to the perception of the speakers. The results showed that: a) stimuli including a nasal were effective for accurate speaker identification; b) coronal nasals were more effective than the labial nasal, and c) the familiarity to the speakers gives a great influence on the performance. The tendencies a) and b) were observed both in familiar and unknown speaker identifications. The results of the acoustical analyses also showed that there were correspondences between the perception of the speaker identity and the cepstral distances among the speakers. The inter-speaker cepstral distances were greater in vowel intervals than in the consonant intervals; especially, notably they were greater in nasals than in orals in the consonant intervals