title: Perceptual susceptibility to acoustic manipulations in speaker discrimination.
abstract: Listeners' ability to discriminate unfamiliar voices is often susceptible to the effects of manipulations of acoustic characteristics of the utterances. This vulnerability was quantified within a task in which participants determined if two utterances were spoken by the same or different speakers. Results of this task were analyzed in relation to a set of historical and novel parameters in order to hypothesize the role of those parameters in the decision process. Listener performance was first measured in a baseline task with unmodified stimuli, and then compared to responses with resynthesized stimuli under three conditions: (1) normalized mean-pitch; (2) normalized duration; and (3) normalized linear predictive coefficients (LPCs). The results of these experiments suggest that perceptual speaker discrimination is robust to acoustic changes, though mean-pitch and LPC modifications are more detrimental to a listener's ability to successfully identify same or different speaker pairings. However, this susceptibility was also found to be partially dependent on the specific speaker and utterances.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems Research, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sell
authors.affiliation: Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des Armées, Département Action et Cognition en Situation Opérationnelle, 91223 Brétigny sur Orge, France.
authors.forename: Clara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Suied
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.
authors.forename: Mounya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Elhilali
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems Research, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
authors.forename: Shihab
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shamma
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000293:Adolescent; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D010898:Pitch Perception; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult