Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Justin Lo (University of York)

Title: Comparing voices across languages: An acoustic and forensic exploration of sibilant /s/ in English and French

Abstract: It is not uncommon for practitioners of forensic voice comparison to encounter materials from more than one language. Cases involving cross-language comparison, where the speech samples being compared are in different languages, pose particular challenges to forensic analysis. While automatic speaker recognition systems claim to be minimally impacted by language mismatch (Künzel 2013), investigations into the efficacy of linguistic-phonetic features in such cases remain limited. In this talk, I will focus on the use of the segmental variable /s/ in English and French. I will report an acoustic study that examines the production of /s/ by bilingual speakers and discuss theoretical implications of the findings. A second study tests the performance of /s/ as a speaker discriminant in same- and cross-language comparisons. I will explore the effects of language mismatch on the discriminatory potential of /s/ and discuss practical implications for forensic casework.