Title (srp)

Voice quality in cross-language forensic speaker comparison

Author

Tomić, Kristina D., 1989-

Contributor

Paunović, Tatjana, 1964-
French, Peter A., 1942-
Ivanović, Maja, 1974-
Jerotijević Tišma, Danica, 1985-

Description (srp)

The aim of the present research is to test the hypothesis that the anatomy of the vocal tract outweighs the linguistic factors in determining individual voice quality for the purpose of confirming that the acoustical measures of VQ could be used in cross-language forensic speaker comparison. The study consists of two perceptual experiments and evaluation of acoustic correlates of VQ under the likelihood ratio framework in same-language and cross-language sample pairs. The corpus for the research was created by recording fifty native speakers of Serbian while speaking Serbian and English over a mobile phone. In the first experiment, four expert listeners rated twenty speakers according to a truncated version of the Vocal Profile Analysis protocol (Laver et al., 1981). The results showed that within-speaker vocal profiles across Serbian and English exhibit lower variability than between-speaker profiles within each language, respectively. In addition, it was found that phonatory settings are more responsible for vocal profile similarity than articulatory settings. In the second experiment, sixty Serbian naïve listeners performed speaker discrimination and assessed voice similarity of same- and different-speaker pairs within and across languages. The study confirmed the existence of the “language familiarity effect” as listeners were able to discriminate speakers with higher accuracy in the same-language than in the cross-language context (92.68% vs 86.22%). Furthermore, while same-speaker samples were rated as slightly less similar in the cross-language context (8.45 vs 8.79), different-speaker samples have a notably higher similarity score in the language-mismatching than in thelanguage-matching condition (4.43 vs 3.61). Likelihood ratio assessment revealed that among the best performing parameters in cross-language comparison are CPP, HNR35, HNR25, H1*-A3*, LTF3 and H1*H2*, with EER ranging between 20%-24% and Cllr between 0.59 and 0.69. In combination, articulatory and phonatory parameters achieved an EER of 1.59% and Cllr of 0.06 in the cross-language context.

Description (srp)

Biografija autora: list 287Bibliografija: str. 216-265 Datum odbrane: 10.01.2025. Linguistics, Phonetics, Forensic Phonetics

Object languages

Serbian

Date

2024

Rights

This work is licensed under a
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 AT - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/at/legalcode