Idiosyncrasy of nasal sounds in human speaker identification and their acoustic properties

1. Introduction Speech sounds convey not only linguistic or phonological information, but also nonlinguistic information, including the speakers' individualities [1]. It is known that the availability of the speech contents used for speaker identification differs depending on the types of sounds they contain, and it is reported that voiced sonorants, such as vowels and nasals, are most effective for speaker identification by both humans [2–4] and machines [5]. The speaker's individuality contained in speech sounds should have some acoustic correlations and their properties can be measured as acoustic parameters [6]. In this study, we conducted a human speaker identification test, and investigated the differences in the effectiveness of using various Japanese sounds in identifying the speakers. We also analysed the stimuli used in the experiment in order to explain these differences in terms of acoustical distances.