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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
The interplay between psychoacoustic perception and L1-specific perception in evaluating the distinctiveness of sound
1Department of English Language and Literature, Ho Sin Hang Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University, 224 Waterloo Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong 999077, China.
Abstract:
A listener's judgement on the perceptual distance between two sounds usually draws on their psychoacoustic difference, but can also be subject to L1-specific perception. This study investigates the interplay between these two aspects when evaluating the perceptual distance of sound pairs. Mandarin and English listeners rated the perceptual distance of consonant-vowel pairs corresponding to sequences legal or illegal in their L1s. The results suggested that a similarity rating task can provide a finer assessment of distinctiveness between sound pairs as compared to a discrimination task. The results also showed how psychoacoustic perception may interact with L1-specific perception in this process.
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