Lombard speech impact on perceptual speaker recognition

It is well known that stress and Lombard effect impact speech production. The goal in this study is to investigate how Lombard effect impacts perceptual speaker recognition. We report results from In-Set/Out-of-Set speaker identification (ID) tasks performed by human subjects with a comparison to automatic algorithms. The main trends show that mismatch in reference and test data causes a significant decrease in speaker ID accuracy. The results also indicate that Lombard speech contributes to higher accuracy for In-Set speaker ID, but interferes with correct detection of Out-of-Set speakers. In addition, it is observed that the mismatched conditions cause a higher false reject rate, and that the matched conditions result in higher false acceptance. We further discuss automated system performance in comparison to human performance. Overall observations suggest that deeper understanding of cognitive factors involved in perceptual speaker ID offers meaningful insights for further development of automatic systems and combined automatic-human based systems.