Knock Knock, Who's There?: Phonetics of Perceived Voice Similarity in Forensic Linguistics
Advisor: Christina Bjorndahl聽
Major: Mathematical Sciences & Drama
Abstract
Voice parades/lineups act as decisive diagnostics for the reliability of an earwitness testimony. Part of the process of generating a voice parade involves selecting comparable 鈥榝oils鈥� for the suspect voice for the earwitness to identify against. However, the relationship between perceived voice similarity and phonetic properties is not yet well understood. The present study aims to investigate the correspondence between listener-assessed speaker similarity and acoustic characteristics of consonants. Listeners will be tasked with rating the similarity of voices selected from a speech database in a perception experiment. Acoustic measures (durational and spectral) of stops and fricatives will be collected from segmented speech recordings. The participant judgement data will then be analyzed against the acoustic data for any correlations. Findings from this study will contribute towards development of more robust voice parade construction practices in courts of law, which will help minimize earwitness misidentification.
Bio
I am a junior majoring in Mathematics and Dramaturgy with an additional major in Linguistics. My favorite avenues of research traverse down paths that relate language to forensic study. I鈥檓 also greatly passionate about mathematics education. I dedicate oodles of my time singing in choir, and the remaining oodles of my days are spent linguistically analyzing the television shows I watch with my friends.