Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals

Abstract

The effects of ingesting ethanol have been shown to be somewhat variable in humans. To date, there appear to be but few universals. Yet, the question often arises: is it possible to determine if a person is intoxicated by observing them in some manner? A closely related question is: can speech be used for this purpose and, if so, can the degree of intoxication be determined? One of the many issues associated with these questions involves the relationships between a person's paralinguistic characteristics and the presence and level of inebriation. To this end, young, healthy speakers of both sexes were carefully selected and sorted into roughly equal groups of light, moderate, and heavy drinkers. They were asked to produce four types of utterances during a learning phase, when sober and at four strictly controlled levels of intoxication (three ascending and one descending). The primary motor speech measures employed were speaking fundamental frequency, speech intensity, speaking rate and nonfluencies. Several statistically significant changes were found for increasing intoxication; the primary ones included rises in F0, in task duration and for nonfluencies. Minor gender differences were found but they lacked statistical significance. So did the small differences among the drinking category subgroups and the subject groupings related to levels of perceived intoxication. Finally, although it may be concluded that certain changes in speech suprasegmentals will occur as a function of increasing intoxication, these patterns cannot be viewed as universal since a few subjects (about 20%) exhibited no (or negative) changes.

Alcohol language corpus: the first public corpus of alcoholized German speech

“…Only a few studies looked into semi-spontaneous speech (e.g. [4,14]). Forensic speech and application speech in the automotive environment will be rather dominated by spontaneous speech, commands, place names and digit strings.…”

“…Quite a number of studies during the last decades have investigated this hypothesis from different points of view: looking for reliable acoustic [18,8] or behavioristic [14,3,33,36] features that may indicate intoxication, studying the physiological effects of alcohol on the articulators [37] or even pursuing forensic questions [18,4,17,22] such as in the infamous case of the captain of the Exxon Valdez [15]. Unfortunately, all these studies have in common that the analyzed empirical speech data are not available for other research groups.…”

“…Most of these studies analyzed fewer than 40 speakers, mostly male, under lab conditions and with read speech, single words or vowels (e.g. [18], [14], [8], [3], [17], [33]). Furthermore, in most studies the amount of intoxication was measured by breath alcohol detectors (BRAC = breath alcohol concentration) or estimated from the intake of beverages.…”

About forensic phonetics

“…A number of relationships emerged (Hollien et al 2001;. Auditors tended to overestimate speaker impairment for individuals who were only mildly (to moderately) intoxicated and, then, underestimate the involvement level of the severely intoxicated ( Figure 9).…”

“…An extensive program of research was conducted at the University of Florida and a number of reports have been published (examples: Hollien et al 2001;. Since other behavioral states (stress, fatigue, emotions) could have complicated attempts to determine intoxication level from speech analysis, the investigators here structured new and innovative protocol.…”