Cross-lingual talker discrimination

This paper describes a talker discrimination experiment in which native English listeners were presented with two sentences spoken by bilingual talkers (English/German and English/Finnish) and were asked to judge whether they thought the sentences were spoken by the same person or not. Equal amounts of cross-lingual and matched-language trials were presented. The experiments showed that listeners are able to complete this task well, they can discriminate between talkers significantly better than chance. However, listeners are significantly less accurate on cross-lingual talker trials than on matched-language pairs. No significant differences were found on this task between German and Finnish. Bias (B′′) and Sensitivity (A′) values are presented to analyse the listeners’ behaviour in more detail. The results are promising for the evaluation of EMIME, a project covering speech-to-speech translation with speaker adaptation.