Sound Change and Speaker Identity: An Acoustic Study

This study investigates whether the pattern of diachronic sound change within a language variety can predict phonetic variability useful for distinguishing speakers. An analysis of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) monophthongs is undertaken to test whether individuals differ more widely in their realisation of sounds undergoing change than in their realisation of more stable sounds. Read speech of 20 male speakers of SSBE aged 18-25 from the DyViS database is analysed. The vowels , demonstrated by previous research to be changing in SSBE, are compared with the relatively stable . Results from Analysis of Variance and Discriminant Analysis based on F1 and F2 frequencies suggest that although `changing' vowels exhibit greater levels of between-speaker variation than `stable' vowels, they may also exhibit large within-speaker variation, resulting in poorer classification rates. Implications for speaker identification applications are discussed.

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