Prosody and its application to forensic linguistics

Abstract

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...

Prosodic Patterns of Refusals: Differences Between English Native, Non-native, and Bilingual Speakers

“…Their results suggested that if children acquire a language early enough, they are more likely to achieve native-like prosody in both languages, as well as a lack of prosodic transfer from one language to the next. However, Harris et al (2014)) found that adult English-Spanish bilingual speakers (18-25 years of age) displayed a greater use of pitch movement when speaking in Spanish than Spanish monolinguals did, suggesting a prosodic transfer from English to Spanish. Most existing studies agree that BLs use prosody differently than monolinguals do, utilizing features of both of their languages (Gut & Pillai, 2015;Harris et al, 2014).…”

“…However, Harris et al (2014)) found that adult English-Spanish bilingual speakers (18-25 years of age) displayed a greater use of pitch movement when speaking in Spanish than Spanish monolinguals did, suggesting a prosodic transfer from English to Spanish. Most existing studies agree that BLs use prosody differently than monolinguals do, utilizing features of both of their languages (Gut & Pillai, 2015;Harris et al, 2014). A BL's dominant language is thought to have a stronger influence over the direction of prosodic transfer than their non-dominant language.…”

Exploring Semantic Prosodic Awareness Levels of Efl Learners Through Near-Synonym Words

“…Several past studies were conducted on cases of semantic prosody with sample words such as happen, set in, naked eye, build up (Louw, 1993); cause and happen (Bublitz, 1996); and break out (Stubbs, 1995). These studies pointed out that the use of SP in context may reveal the mental or emotional state of a user (Harris et al, 2014). Sinclair (1991) adds to this stating that the user's mental and unconscious state works upon an idiom principle, meaning that it is based on multi-word combinations and the connotational features of the lexical items.…”

Presentation Matters: Evaluating Speaker Identification Tasks

“…Decisions regarding which speech recordings to select and their sequence have the potential to influence witnesses and interpretations of evidence. Some examples that have been studied include accent [7] and prosody [8]. With respect to presenting materials and findings at judiciary proceedings, it is of upmost importance to eliminate or minimise any biasing features.…”