Forensic Speech Science

Abstract

As part of the Expert Evidence series this chapter is intended to be accessible to lawyers, judges, police officers, and potential jury members; however, it is hoped that this chapter will also be of interest to forensic scientists, phoneticians / speech scientists, speech-processing engineers, and students of all these disciplines. It introduces forensic speech science in a relatively non-technical way, assuming a reader who has no prior knowledge of the subject. The 2010 edition had a heavy focus on acoustic-phonetic statistical approaches to forensic voice comparison. The 2018 edition has a heavier focus on automatic approaches. The 2018 edition includes examples of forensic voice comparison based on real cases. The 2018 edition also includes expended coverage of other branches of forensic speech science. Topics covered include: The likelihood ratio framework for the evaluation of forensic evidence. Approaches to forensic voice comparison. Assessing the validity and reliability of forensic-comparison systems. Speaker identification by laypeople. Disputed utterance analysis.