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This article describes three studies in prosody and their potential application to the field of forensic linguistics. It begins with a brief introduction to prosody. It then proceeds to describe Miglio, Gries, & Harris (2014), a comparison of prosodic coding of new information by bilingual Spanish-English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers. A description of Harris & Gries (2011) follows. This study compares the vowel duration variability of bilingual Spanish-English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers, and touches upon corpus-based frequency effects and differences in linguistic aptitude between the two speaker groups. Finally, a portion of an ongoing study is described (Harris in preparation). This section describes the use of prosodic variables and ensemble methods (or methods that use multiple learning algorithms) to classify languages, even in the case of impoverished data. All three experiments have implications and applications to the field of forensic linguistics, which are touched upon in each respective section and discussed more extensively in the final section of this article. Furthermore, the applications of these methods to forensic linguistics are discussed in light of best practices for forensic linguistics, as outlined in Chaski (2013). OverviewRecognizing a speaker's dialect, gender, pathological conditions, native language, or socio-cultural background are skills acquired through training in different areas of linguistics, such as dialectology, acoustic/ articulatory phonetics, and sociolinguistics. They are also skills that are applicable to the field of the forensic sciences, specifically what has (2008) provides statistic models of formant features that represent the vocal tract characteristics of speakers, and are therefore capable of accounting for between-speaker and within-speaker variability. In the same vein as these studies, this article reviews the use of statistically-informed empirical methods used to analyze the features of spoken speech. We would like to go even further, however, and move beyond the acoustic phonetic analysis of speakers' voice characteristics. The novelty of this paper, in fact, lies in applying empirical methods to speakers' characteristics associated with the grammar of their dialect/language, in these cases different aspects of pronunciation that can be theoretically informed and empirically verified via scientific methodology. This is to say that the methodologies described in the current paper investigate acoustic properties beyond the phonemes, or the 'baseline acoustic system' to use Hansen, Slyh, & Anderson's (2004) term. Instead, it uses high-level phonological cues to successfully profile speakers; high-level phonological cues are those associated with the manner in which a word is pronounced, such as volume or melodic tone. Past studies have considered prosodic cues in speech recognition. Lea (1973Lea ( , 1976 advocates prosodic data for speech recognition algorithms. Lea (1973) suggests that stressed syllables contain more salie...

A topic that has attracted increasingly more interest in linguistics, and in studies on bilingualism in particular, is the speech of heritage speakers. 1 Heritage speakers are early bilingual speakers that grow up speaking language A at home, but grow up in a community speaking language B, which ends up becoming their dominant language. Heritage speakers are interesting as they allow researchers to assess the influence of a dominant language on a minority language in a situation of prolonged contact. In this paper, we compare the Spanish of heritage speakers (early bilinguals) to that of L2 learners (late bilinguals) through an acceptability-judgment experiment. Specifically, we contrast the two speaker groups in terms of how much they match the prescriptively correct ratings provided by a control group for instances of 'inverse constructions' represented by the verb gustar 'to like' whose behavior in Spanish differs from English to like. The experimental design systematically manipulated a variety of factors known to affect the acceptability of inverse constructions, including the position of the stimulus, the presence of clitic doubling of stressed pronouns ('reduplication'), negation, and agreement mismatches between the verb and its syntactic subject. A logistic regression reveals a significant correlation between our predictors and the ability of the two speaker groups to make the right judgments and an intermediate classification accuracy; in addition, the data reveal a bewildering complexity of two-and three-way interactions between the predictors. We found that in certain ways heritage speakers are more like L2 advanced Spanish speakers, but that they are also sensitive to frequency patterns found in natural language and, in that sense, they behave more similarly to monolingual native speakers. Overall we find that pragmatic and cognitive factors affect the performance of subjects in complex and subtle ways that are not easily ascribable only to the direct influence of the dominant language over the minority language in this contact situation.

In communication, speakers and listeners need ways to highlight certain information and relegate other information to the background. They also need to keep track of what information they (think they) have already communicated to the listener, and of the listeners' (supposed) knowledge of topics and referents. This knowledge and its layout in the utterance is commonly referred to as information structure, i.e., the degree to which propositions and referents are given or new. All languages have 'chosen' different ways to encode such information structure, for instance by modifying the pitch or intensity of the vocal signal or the order of words in a sentence. In this study, we assess whether the use of pitch to signal new information holds in typologically different languages such as English and Spanish by analyzing three population group monolingual California English speakers, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish from California (Chicano Spanish), and monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers from Mexico City.Our study goes beyond previous work in several respects. First, most current work is based on sentences just read or elicited in response to highly standardized and often somewhat artificial stimuli whose generalizability to more naturalistic settings may be questionable. We opted instead to use semidirected interviews whose more naturalistic setting provides data with a higher degree of authenticity. Second, in order to deal with the resulting higher degree of noise in the data as well as the inherent multifactoriality of the data, we are using state-of-the-art statistical methods to explore our data, namely generalized linear mixed-effects modeling, to accommodate speaker-and lexically-specific variability. Despite the noisy data, we find that contour tones including H+L or L+H sequences signal new information, and that items encoding new information also exhibit proportionally longer stressed vowels, than those encoding given information. We also find cross-dialectal variation between monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers on the one hand and monolingual English speakers and Chicanos on the other: Mexican Spanish speakers modify pitch contours less than monolingual English speakers, whereas the English patterns affect even the Spanish pronunciation of early bilinguals. Our findings, therefore, corroborate Gussenhoven's theory (2002) that some aspects of intonation are shared cross-linguistically (longer vowel length & higher pitch for new info), whereas others are encoded language-specifically and vary even across dialects (pitch excursion & the packaging of information structure).

Intriducción por Viola G. Miglio.