Earwitnesses: effects of accent, retention and telephone

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of accent, telephone and a relatively long retention interval (3 or 8 weeks) on speaker identification. Three-hundred and sixty participants heard the target's voice and were asked to identify the target by means of a line-up consisting of 6 voices. Half of the participants were given a target-present line-up and the other half a target-absent line-up. The results showed that 24% of participants correctly identified the target in the targetpresent condition (hits), whereas 50% of participants incorrectly identified a person as the target in the target-absent condition (false alarms). The speaker with the standard-accented voice was more often correctly recognized than the speaker with the non-standard-accented voice. No difference was found between identification accuracy after one, three or eight weeks and between the telephone and non-telephone conditions. It can be concluded that there is a relatively high probability that an innocent defendant is identified as the perpetrator, even in a procedurally correct voice line-up (in this experiment 8%). Furthermore, reliability may be drastically reduced when the perpetrator has a strong accent, unfamiliar to the listener. On the other hand, reliability of a voice line-up seems not to be affected by a presentation over the telephone, as well as by a retention interval of at least 8 weeks.

The “other-accent” effect in voice recognition

“…This was revealed both in the poorer identification of other-accented targets in target-present lineups and the greater mistaken identification of foils in target-absent lineups. Indeed, the pattern of results accords with those of Kerstholt et al (2006) and of Phillipon et al (2007) in revealing a high false alarm rate to foils when they had an unfamiliar accent. It is worth noting that the other-accent effect revealed here was obtained despite an immediate test and despite the use of clear voices and good listening conditions.…”

“…An other-accent effect was still demonstrated, with Australian listeners showing a significant impairment when recognising English speakers with an unfamiliar (English) accent than when recognising English speakers with a familiar (Australian) accent. Similarly, Kerstholt, Jansen, van Amelsvoort, and Broeders (2006) examined the impact of a regional accent by using standard and nonstandard Dutch speakers as targets in a voice recognition task. Despite a smaller difference by varying accent at a regional level, results again supported previous demonstrations, showing an impaired performance with unfamiliar accented speakers both when the target was present, and when the target was absent.…”

Earwitness identification performance: the effect of language, target, deliberate strategies and indirect measures

“…This is in line with the literature (e.g. Kerstholt et al, 2004Kerstholt et al, , 2006vanWallendael et al, 1994). The effect of the unfamiliar language being stronger in the TA condition is consistent with that of Sullivan and Schlichting (2000).…”

Overhearing the Planning of A Crime: Do Adults Outperform Children As Earwitnesses?

“…Studies with longer retention intervals have shown mixed results. While some did not find a decrease in performance between a delay of 1 week and 2 weeks (Van Wallendael et al 1994), 1 week and 8 weeks (Kerstholt et al 2006) or 2 and 8 weeks (McGehee 1944), others have found a significant drop in performance between week 2 and week 3 (Clifford & Denot cited in Bull and Clifford 1984) and also that the false alarm rate increases after 7 days (Yarmey and Matthys 1992). In order to achieve a reasonable degree of ecological validity we decided to use a retention interval of 2 weeks.…”