LANGUAGE AND SPEECH, Vol. 21, Part 4,1978 305 INTONATION AND SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION*

The work described investigated the ability of listeners t o identify familiar speakers solely on the basis of suprasegmental laryngeal information. The results of perceptual experiments using both natural stimuli, and synthetic stimuli with manipulations in the time and fre-quency domains, show that mean fundamental frequency and fundamental-frequency contour shape provide important speaker identifying information for an age-, sex- and accent- matched group even in the absence of all supraglottal features. The investigation is set in the context of the normalisation level of speech perception. SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION AND SPEECH PERCEPTION hlost work investigating the level of speech perception at which acoustic data are converted into phonetic and phonologically utilizable material has been concerned with cues for the recognition and categorisation of vowel and consonant segments, and much less experimental attention has been paid to the role of acoustic patterns in the percep-tion of suprasegmental features in either their linguistic (prosodic) or paralinguistic functions. The acoustic patterns of speech contain both linguistic and paralinguistic information