Language Dependency of /s/ Production: Native Dutch Versus Non-Native English.

Abstract

With forensic recordings being collected in multiple languages increasingly often, this study investigates the language dependency of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in speakers of native (L1) Dutch and non-native (L2) English. Due to phonetic similarity between the languages, Dutch learners of English may exhibit language-independent /s/ acoustics, making it an interesting feature for multilingual forensic speaker comparisons (FSCs). However, the findings show that out of the four spectral moments, center of gravity, standard deviation (SD), skewness, and kurtosis, only SD remained stable across the languages; the other measurements were language-dependent. The results were largely independent of the /s/ tokens' contexts, although an interaction between language and context was found for skewness and kurtosis: With a labial right phonetic neighbor, language dependency was largely reduced. The findings have implications for FSCs: as /s/ is language-dependent in speakers of L1 Dutch and L2 English, it shows limited potential for cross-linguistic speaker comparisons in forensic casework.