Influence of prosodic information on the discrimination of vocal quality.

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Recognition of vocal qualities of Japanese speakers and North American/British speakers who speak several short sentences in Japanese and in English was examined by carrying out several experiments. It was found that the identification of a speaker as Japanese or as non-Japanese was done at a rather high rate, although the ratings on the speaker's voice were significantly influenced by the language that he was speaking. It was suggested that recognition of vocal quality of a speaker should be greatly influenced by the prosody of the languages spoken by the speaker. The relationship between the memory of vocal quality and the language spoken by the speaker was further investigated. Participants rated the vocal quality of a speaker (the first session) and after one week the same experiment was again conducted (the second session). The ratings of the voices were little different from each other, irrespective of one-week blank.