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Abstract
The purpose of the research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if question and suspect sample are in different languages using temporal parameters (articulation rate, speaking rate, degree of hesitancy, percentage of pauses, average pause duration). The corpus includes 10 female native speakers of Serbian who are proficient in English. The parameters are tested using Bayesian likelihood ratio formula in 40 same-speaker and 360 different-speaker pairs, including estimation of error rates, equal error rates and Overall Likelihood Ratio. One-way ANOVA is performed to determine whether inter-speaker variability is higher than intra- speaker variability across languages. The most successful discriminant is degree of hesitancy with ER of 42.5%/28%, (EER: 33%), followed by average pause duration with ER 35%/45.56%, (EER: 40%). Although the research features a closed-set comparison, which is not very common in forensic reality, the results are still relevant for forensic phoneticians working on criminal cases or as expert witnesses. This study pioneers in forensically comparing Serbian and English as well as in forensically testing temporal parameters on bilingual speakers. Further research should focus on comparing two stress-timed or two syllable-timed languages to test whether they will be more comparable in terms of temporal aspects of speech.
Highlights
The goal of the current research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if the question and suspect sample are in different languages using temporal parameters: articulation rate (AR), speaking rate (SR), degree of hesitancy (DOH), percentage of pauses in speech (PPS) and average pause duration (APD)
Equal error rate for degree of hesitancy was estimated to be 33%. These results indicate that the ratio of silent and filled pauses in speech is a feature that goes beyond the language spoken, that is, most of the participants are rather consistent in the amount of filled pauses they use when speaking in either their mother tongue or a foreign language
The parameters that he was concerned with included speech rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), percentage of pauses in speech (PPS), pause free interval, number of syllables between pauses, ratio of silent and filled pauses (SFP), and ratio of pauses with and without respiratory activity (RESP)
Summary
The goal of the current research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if the question and suspect sample are in different languages (on the example of native Serbian and English as a foreign language) using temporal parameters: articulation rate (AR), speaking rate (SR), degree of hesitancy (DOH), percentage of pauses in speech (PPS) and average pause duration (APD). There are reports that the values of these parameters may differ across languages (see Laver, 1994: 541); many researchers have not confirmed the existence of such differences, at least when the number of sound segments per second is used as the unit of measurement (see Roach, 1998: 153; Trouvain & Möbius, 2014: 277). One may argue that it is futile to consider speaking rate and pauses as viable parameters for cross-lingual forensic comparison because silent pauses occur more often when speaking in the foreign language, as non-native speakers tend to leave their hesitancy markers unfilled, produce false starts and make more repetitions and errors (Rieger, 2003). As the current research deals with cross-linguistic tempo comparison, the appropriate unit for measurement is considered to be the number of realized phones per second. Glottal stop is regarded as a phone, as in the research performed by Trouvain et al
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