Speaker idiosyncratic intensity and mouth opening-closing variations: the case of English

Abstract

This study investigated speaker idiosyncrasy in intensity and mouth opening-closing variations using an English corpus containing both acoustic and articulatory data (19 speakers ✕ 59 read sentences). The speeds of intensity as well as mouth opening-closing movements were calculated and summarized in terms of the mean, standard deviation, and pairwise variability index per sentence. Multinomial logistic regressions were used
to test the speaker effect and evaluate the amount of between-speaker variability explained by each measure. It was found that all measures showed significant speaker effect. Moreover, the measures pertaining to the speeds of intensity and mouth opening-closing movements explained more between-speaker variability in English.