May I Speak Freely? The Difficulty in Vocal Identity Processing Across Free and Scripted Speech
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May I Speak Freely? The Difficulty in Vocal Identity Processing Across Free and Scripted Speech Sarah V. Stevenage1 · Rebecca Tomlin1 · Greg J. Neil2 · Ashley E. Symons1 Accepted: 17 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the fields of face recognition and voice recognition, a growing literature now suggests that the ability to recognize an individual despite changes from one instance to the next is a considerable challenge. The present paper reports on one experiment in the voice domain designed to determine whether a change in the mere style of speech may result in a measurable difficulty when trying to discriminate between speakers. Participants completed a speaker discrimination task to pairs of speech clips, which represented either free speech or scripted speech segments. The results suggested that speaker discrimination was significantly better when the style of speech did not change compared to when it did change, and was significantly better from scripted than from free speech segments. These results support the emergent body of evidence suggesting that within-identity variability is a challenge, and the forensic implications of such a mild change in speech style are discussed. Keywords Vocal identity processing · Spontaneous speech · Scripted speech · Speaker discrimination
Introduction A growing literature now recognizes that the task of human identification involves both the ability to tell apart similar instances belonging to different individuals, and the ability to tell together different instances belonging to the same individual (Burton 2013). In the context of the latter task, it is noted that the ability to recognize an individual, or to match one instance to another, is made considerably more difficult when those instances reflect a natural level of variability. The result is that a perceiver may often mistake two different instances of the same individual as belonging to different people. In the face domain, this is exemplified by the difficulty in identifying an individual across changes in pose, lighting, camera angle, or even in the camera used to take the photograph (Young and Burton 2017). This difficulty is perhaps most starkly demonstrated in a face sorting task (Jenkins et al. * Sarah V. Stevenage [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, Hampshire SO17 1BJ, UK
2
School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences, Solent University, Southampton, UK
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
2011) where participants are asked to sort naturally varying (or ambient) images of two identities into identity piles. If unfamiliar with the identities, participants can struggle with the sorting task, and performance will often show a failure to tell instances of the same person together (Andrews et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2011; Zhou and Mondloch 2016). The same difficulty in coping with within-identity variability also arises in the voice domain. Indeed, performance in an unfamiliar voice sorting task suggests a diff
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