Speaker discrimination performance for "easy" versus "hard" voices in style-matched and -mismatched speech

This study compares human speaker discrimination performance for read speech versus casual conversations and explores differences between unfamiliar voices that are "easy " versus "hard " to "tell together " versus "tell apart. " Thirty listeners were asked whether pairs of short style-matched or -mismatched, text-independent utterances represented the same or different speakers. Listeners performed better when stimuli were style-matched, particularly in read speech-read speech trials (equal error rate, EER, of 6.96% versus 15.12% in conversation-conversation trials). In contrast, the EER was 20.68% for the style-mismatched condition. When styles were matched, listeners' confidence was higher when speakers were the same versus different; however, style variation caused decreases in listeners' confidence for the "same speaker " trials, suggesting a higher dependency of this task on within-speaker variability. The speakers who were "easy " or "hard " to "tell together " were not the same as those who were "easy " or "hard " to "tell apart. " Analysis of speaker acoustic spaces suggested that the difference observed in human approaches to "same speaker " and "different speaker " tasks depends primarily on listeners' different perceptual strategies when dealing with within- versus between-speaker acoustic variability.& nbsp;(C) 2022 Acoustical Society of America.