"Who’s calling, please?” Is there speaker-specific information in twins’ vowels?
Pieternel van Braak, Willemijn F. L. Heeren · Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) · 2015
An anecdote: the father of a monozygotic twin pair at times seems unable to identify his adult twin daughters over the phone, even though identification in direct communication yields no problems. Since this is an anecdote, there is no evidence that acoustic differences indeed crucially contribute to the perceptual difference between transmission channels. However, anatomical and environmental similarities between twins, in combination with the filtering of telephone transmission, may influence the speech signal in such a way that the father cannot distinguish between his twin daughters. We explored if transmission channel characteristics of direct versus telephone recording influence how well a monozygotic twin pair is identified by listeners who know them well. We addressed this question by means of a small-scale perception test in which a third, non-related speaker was also included, to compare speaker confusion between twin and non-twin speakers.