Identification of talkers speaking emotional speech
Kyung Wha Kim, Patrick C. M. Wong · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
Identification of talkers speaking emotional speech is common in many communicative situations and forensic "voice line ups". However, emotional speech is auditorily and acoustically different from neutral speech, which may cause difficulty in talker identification. In this study, we examined how listeners identify different talkers speaking emotional or neutral voices, and how short-term training may benefit talker identification. Recordings were obtained from 10 male speakers speaking in angry and neutral voices. Within one session, listeners were first trained to identify the talkers, and their ability to generalize to untrained sentences spoken by the same talkers was tested. We found that while there was no significant difference in identifying neutral and angry voices, the ability to generalize to untrained sentences was more impaired with angry voices. The theoretical and forensic implications of these results are discussed. [Work supported by NIH and NSF]