Auditory speaker discrimination by forensic phoneticians and naive listeners in voiced and whispered speech

Abstract

In whispered speech some important cues to a speaker’s identity (e.g. fundamental frequency, intonation) are inevitably absent. In the present study we investigated listeners’ ability to discriminate between speakers in short utterances in voiced and whispered speech. The performances of a group of 11 forensic phoneticians and a group of 22 naive listeners were compared in a binary forced-choice speaker dis- crimination task, with 48 same-speaker and 60 different-speaker pairs of short speech samples (≤ 3 s) in each test. Listeners we Show more