Disentangling Speaker and Language Effects in Cross-Lingual Speaker Verification for Iberian Languages

Abstract

Cross-lingual speaker verification (SV) systems typically exhibit performance degradation when enrollment and test utterances are spoken in different languages. However, standard evaluation protocols confound language mismatch with inter-speaker variability, as evaluation is generally performed with different speakers across languages. In this work, we introduce a bilingual same-speaker evaluation set for five Iberian languages, enabling analysis of cross-lingual SV under constant speaker identity. We apply this setup to a HuBERT-based SV system previously shown to exhibit strong language dependence, and analyze results using the Cross-Lingual Transfer Matrix (CLTM) to study pairwise cross-lingual transfer. Our results show that speaker-related variability accounts for part of the observed degradation, but language mismatch remains the main driver of cross-lingual performance loss. These findings provide a more precise characterization of language dependence in cross-lingual SV.