ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

Influences of vowel duration on speaker-size estimation and discrimination

Chihiro Takeshima, Minoru Tsuzaki, Toshio Irino

Several experimental studies have shown that the human auditory system has a mechanism for extracting speaker-size information, using sufficiently long sounds. This paper investigated influence of vowel duration on the processing for size extraction using short vowels. In a size estimation experiment, listeners subjectively estimated the size (height) of the speaker for isolated vowels. The results showed that listenersĀf perception of speaker size was highly correlated with the factor of vocal-tract length in all the tested durations (from 16 ms to 256 ms). In a size discrimination experiment, listeners were presented with two vowels scaled the vocal-tract length and were asked which vowel was perceived to be spoken by a smaller speaker. The results showed that the just-noticeable differences (JNDs) in speaker size were almost the same for the durations longer than 32 ms. However, the JNDs rose considerably for 16-ms duration. These observations of the experiments suggest that the auditory system can extract speaker-size information even for 16-ms vowels although the precision of size extraction would deteriorate when the duration becomes less than 32 ms.