CHARACTERISTICS THAT DETERMINE SPEAKER RECOGNITION.

Abstract : Development and evaluation of three types of speaker-discrimination tests are discussed, including effects of various types of signal degradation upon human speaker-recognition performance and comparisons of various techniques for differentiating among speakers. Properties of three tests--a Four-Alternative Forced-Choice Test, an ABX Test, and a Same-Different Test--are described. Using these tests, it was found that effects of signal degradation upon speaker discrimination performance are small in comparison with effects of the same degradation upon intelligibility. It was found that various physical measures and psycho-physical scaling techniques provide information appropriate for discrimination among talkers. However, none of these techniques performed as well as human observers and provided little direct information regarding the characteristics used by human observers in discriminating among talkers. (Author)