Evaluation of a foreign speaker in forensic phonetics: a report

Abstract

Expert witnesses in phonetics find themselves more and more often in forensic situations in which they have to identify the voice of a speaker who does not speak their native language. Until recently, little has been known about the role which the native language background of the listener plays in such speaker identification tasks. In this report, several aspects of an experimental investigation on the influence of native-language background on speaker identification are reviewed. Results of a first experiment are reported and some follow-up experiments currently being carried our are described within that context.