A Forensic Aspect of Articulation Rate Variation in Chinese

Abstract

This study presents the statistical data for the articulation rate (AR) of 101 male Chinese speakers. 100 spontaneous telephone speech samples produced by 100 speakers and 10 samples produced by another speaker are investigated to test the inter- and intra-speaker variation of AR respectively. Two separate histograms for the global AR and the mean AR are shown to be near normal distribution. It is found that the range of AR for the one speaker is small and relatively stable when the topic and style are similar. The global AR and mean AR can be used as discriminatory features for forensic speaker identification.