The Role of Nasal and Lateral Consonants in Persian Speaker Identification: An Acoustic Analysis of Spectral Moments

The present study investigates the role of nasal and lateral consonants in Persian in discriminating between speakers, employing acoustic phonetic methods. On this basis, the acoustic parameters of the spectral moments of nasal and lateral sounds were extracted and subsequently analyzed using two statistical models with a database comprising 24 male and female Persian speakers. First, a linear mixed-effects model was employed to ascertain significant discrepancies in the acoustic characteristics of these sounds. Subsequently, a linear discriminant analysis model was utilized to assess the relative capacity of the spectral moments to differentiate between the speakers' individual features. The results demonstrated that the skewness parameter in the nasal sound /m/ exhibited the greatest potential for discriminating between speakers in the male and female groups. Nasal sounds demonstrated a superior capacity for revealing individual differences compared to lateral sounds. Additionally, while /l/ was not a robust marker for speaker discrimination, the skewness and kurtosis parameters in this sound may reflect limited differences between speakers.