Abstract
Human listeners have a remarkable ability to recognize speakers by their voice, but within-speaker voice variability through different speaking styles, for example, can reduce recognition performance. In this study, we investigated voice discrimination across speaking styles in Persian. One hundred and fortythree naïve Persian listeners were asked to decide whether pairs of style-matched utterances in childdirected, spontaneous, read and clear speech originated from the same or different speakers. Listeners’ performance across speaking styles was examined using the bias-free sensitivity measure A’, and the bias measure b’’D. Results showed that listeners performed accurately across all speaking styles but more poorly in child-directed speech. They had a bias toward responding ‘different’ regardless of the speaking style, thus suggesting a more general difficulty telling people together than apart
Pellegrino, Elisa