Speaker identification based on speech rhythm: the case of bilinguals

Abstract

Voices are highly individual. The present study investigated how temporal characteristics of speech can contribute to speaker individuality for the same speaker speaking in different languages. By now there is a large body of evidence showing that measures based on temporal characteristics of consonantal and vocalic interval durations show drastic within language variability that is to a high degree a result of between speaker variability ([1], [2], [4]). Here we present results from an experiment on L2 and bilingual Italian/German speakers. Our assumption was that if speaker idiosyncratic rhythmic characteristics exist, then they should be present across utterances from different languages produced by the same speaker