Bilingual Acoustic Voice Variation is Similarly Structured Across Languages

Johnson, Khia A.; Babel, Molly; Fuhrman, Robert

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2020-3095

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While we follow previous work in our implementation of the voice disguise (Holmes et al, 2018;Mitterer et al, 2020 ), an individual's voice identity is available in other spectral and temporal patterns. Speakers vary in terms of their unique voice profiles (Lee et al, 2019;Johnson et al, 2020) and listeners exploit different acoustic cues for talker identification (Van Lancker et al, 1985;Lavner et al, 2000). Schuerman et al (2015Schuerman et al ( , 2019 did not find support for an own-voice advantage within an individual's first language when presenting noise-vocoded speech, a type of degradation in which many spectral cues important to talker identification are severely reduced, though Schuerman (2017) finds some evidence for an own-voice benefit for word recognition in sentences for speech in noise, which better retains talker-specific information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals

Cheung

Babel

2022

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The current study examines the self-voice benefit in an early bilingual population. Female Cantonese–English bilinguals produced words containing Cantonese contrasts. A subset of these minimal pairs was selected as stimuli for a perception task. Speakers’ productions were grouped according to how acoustically contrastive their pronunciation of each minimal pair was and these groupings were used to design personalized experiments for each participant, featuring their own voice and the voices of others’ similarly-contrastive tokens. The perception task was a two-alternative forced-choice word identification paradigm in which participants heard isolated Cantonese words, which had undergone synthesis to mask the original talker identity. Listeners were more accurate in recognizing minimal pairs produced in their own (disguised) voice than recognizing the realizations of speakers who maintain similar degrees of phonetic contrast for the same minimal pairs. Generally, individuals with larger phonetic contrasts were also more accurate in word identification for self and other voices overall. These results provide evidence for an own-voice benefit for early bilinguals. These results suggest that the phonetic distributions that undergird phonological contrasts are heavily shaped by one’s own phonetic realizations.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals

Cheung

Babel

2022

Front. Psychol.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Acoustic voice variation in spontaneous speech

Lee

Kreiman

2022

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study replicates and extends the recent findings of Lee, Keating, and Kreiman [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146(3), 1568–1579 (2019)] on acoustic voice variation in read speech, which showed remarkably similar acoustic voice spaces for groups of female and male talkers and the individual talkers within these groups. Principal component analysis was applied to acoustic indices of voice quality measured from phone conversations for 99/100 of the same talkers studied previously. The acoustic voice spaces derived from spontaneous speech are highly similar to those based on read speech, except that unlike read speech, variability in fundamental frequency accounted for significant acoustic variability. Implications of these findings for prototype models of speaker recognition and discrimination are considered.

show abstract

Bilingual acoustic voice variation: the case of Sorani Kurdish-Persian speakers

Asiaee¹,

Asadi²

2023

Auc Philologica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many individuals around the world speak two or more than two languages. This phenomenon adds a fascinating dimension of variability to speech, both in perception and production. But do bilinguals change their voice when they switch from one language to the other? It is typically assumed that while some aspects of the speech signal vary for linguistic reasons, some indexical features remain unchanged across languages. Yet little is known about the influence of language on within- and between-speaker vocal variability. The present study investigated how acoustic parameters of voice quality are structured in two languages of a bilingual speaker and to what extent such features may vary between bilingual speakers. For this purpose, speech samples of 10 simultaneous Sorani Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers were acoustically analyzed. Following a psychoacoustic model proposed by Kreiman (2014) and using a series of principal component analyses, we found that Sorani Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers followed a similar acoustic pattern in their two different languages, suggesting that each speaker has a unique voice but uses the same voice parameters when switching from one language to the other.

show abstract

Bilingual Acoustic Voice Variation is Similarly Structured Across Languages

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals

Acoustic voice variation in spontaneous speech

Bilingual acoustic voice variation: the case of Sorani Kurdish-Persian speakers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About