ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

The role of glottal pulse rate and vocal tract length in the perception of speaker identity

Etienne Gaudrain, Su Li, Vin Shen Ban, Roy D. Patterson

In natural speech, for a given speaker, vocal tract length (VTL) is effectively fixed whereas glottal pulse rate (GPR) is varied to indicate prosodic distinctions. This suggests that VTL will be a more reliable cue for identifying a speaker than GPR. It also suggests that listeners will accept larger changes in GPR before perceiving speaker change. We measured the effect of GPR and VTL on the perception of a speaker difference, and found that listeners hear different speakers given a VTL difference of 25%, but they require a GPR difference of 45%.