Channel and language effects on reaction time in a voice identification.
Kyna S. Fasnacht, Ruth Huntley Bahr · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
Previous research has indicated that listeners have difficulty with bilingual speaker identification when voice samples are compared across languages [Bahr and Frisch (2002)]. Communication channel can negatively impact voice identification, but its effect on bilingual speaker identification has not been well defined. Reaction time has also been found to increase for speech processing when speaker accent is strong [Schmid and Yeni-Komshian (1999)]. Therefore, it is the purpose of this investigation to assess the effect of channel differences and language to determine how these factors influence recognition accuracy and processing time. A paired comparison listening task was used to evaluate monolingual listeners' performance when channel (laboratory quality, landline phone, and cell phone transmissions) and language (English versus various dialects of Spanish) were varied. Reaction time was recorded to investigate changes in processing demands. Results indicated that listeners were less accurate when channel conditions varied. Difficulties with language/dialect were more noticeable in conversation. These findings were evident in both the accuracy and reaction time data. The role of dialectal variation in the forensic speaker identification process will be described and related to findings from the stereotype literature, which describes “an other race effect,” i.e., all dialects of Spanish sound the same.