Abstract
Temporal organizations of the speech signal are highly individual among speakers of the same language. In the present study, we looked at speech production of bi-dialectal speakers using two varieties of the same language. We aimed at testing whether speaker-specific temporal features present in one dialect remain in another dialect of the same speaker. 20 sentences and one passage in both Mandarin and Danyang Dialect of 14 bi-dialectal speakers were recorded. We measured between- speaker variability of the percentage of voiced interval duration (percentVO) in both dialect conditions using linear mixed effect models. Results revealed that speakers exhibited distinct between- speaker variability when dialect variability and style variability were introduced. However, within-speaker variability was also present and the magnitude of the variability differences varied among different speakers and in different speaking styles. Findings of the current study are particularly relevant for forensic voice comparison tasks when a mismatch in speaking languages in trace and suspect materials is present.
Zhang, Yu