Walton J H, Orlikoff R F
Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Mississippi, University 38677.
J Speech Hear Res. 1994 Aug;37(4):738-45. doi: 10.1044/jshr.3704.738.
One-second acoustic samples were extracted from the mid-portion of sustained /a/ vowels produced by 50 black and 50 white adult males. Each vowel sample from a black subject was randomly paired with a sample from a white subject. From the tape-recorded samples alone, both expert and naive listeners could determine the race of the speaker with 60% accuracy. The accuracy of race identification was independent of the listener's own race, sex, or listening experience. An acoustic analysis of the samples revealed that, although within ranges reported by previous studies of normal voices, the black speakers had greater frequency perturbation, significantly greater amplitude perturbation, and a significantly lower harmonics-to-noise ratio than did the white speakers. The listeners were most successful in distinguishing voice pairs when the differences in vocal perturbation and additive noise were greatest and were least successful when such differences were minimal or absent. Because there were no significant differences in the mean fundamental frequency or formant structure of the voice samples, it is likely that the listeners relied on differences in spectral noise to discriminate the black and white speakers.
从50名成年黑人男性和50名成年白人男性发出的持续/a/元音的中间部分提取一秒钟的声学样本。来自黑人受试者的每个元音样本都与来自白人受试者的样本随机配对。仅从录音样本来看，专家听众和普通听众都能以60%的准确率确定说话者的种族。种族识别的准确率与听众自身的种族、性别或听力经验无关。对样本的声学分析表明，尽管在先前关于正常嗓音的研究报告范围内，但黑人说话者比白人说话者有更大的频率微扰、明显更大的幅度微扰以及明显更低的谐波噪声比。当嗓音微扰和附加噪声的差异最大时，听众最能成功区分嗓音对；而当这种差异最小或不存在时，听众最不成功。由于嗓音样本的平均基频或共振峰结构没有显著差异，听众很可能是依靠频谱噪声的差异来区分黑人和白人说话者的。
