Perception of Speaker Identity and its Relation to the Phonological Features

摘要

In perceptual speaker identification, it is known that the identification accuracy depends on the contents of the stimuli presented to the listeners. In our previous experiments, we found that the stimuli containing a nasal sound are effective for speaker identification by listening, and that coronal sounds are more effective than labial ones. In this present study, we investigated the effects of the stimulus contents again, this time focusing on the vowels in CV monosyllabic stimuli. Through the experiment we obtained the following outcomes: 1) nasal sounds gained significantly higher scores than oral sounds, although the difference between the sonorants and the obstruents was not significant; 2) alveolar nasals were more effective than the labial nasal; 3) palatalisation of a consonant improved speaker identification performances; and 4) back vowels were more effective than front vowels significantly. These tendencies imply the following phonological grounds: 1) [+nas] is more important than [+son]; 2) [+nas] comes under [PLACE] as to the judgment of the speaker identity; 3) [son] may lie under [nas] in the identification of the speakers, and 4) [-ant] and [+back] are also important for speaker identification.