Perceptual Criteria of Speaker Identity
William D. Voiers · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1961
An experiment was designed to determine the nature and number of basically different ways in which, or dimensions in terms of which, a given voice may be perceived to differ from another voice or voices; to determine, in effect, the nature and number of independent channels potentially available to a listener for information as to speaker identity. Tentative identification of these perceptual channels was accomplished by a factor analysis of 32 listeners' perceptual responses (on a 49 scale modified semantic differential rating form) to 16 speakers' voices under systematically varied listening conditions. Seven well-defined factors and several tentative factors were revealed by the analysis. Following the computation of “factor scores” for each of the 512 listener-speaker “intersections,” analyses of variance with factoral design were employed to determine the relative contributions of speakers, listeners, conditions, and their interactions to variation in each dimension of the perceptual factor space. Based on the results of these analyses, a simplified, pure-factor voice-rating form was constructed and used in additional experiments designed to estimate the amounts of speaker identity information potentially communicable to a listener via each of the perceptual channels in question.