@article {522,
	title = {Idiosyncratic and linguistic information in /s/ in telephone speech},
	year = {2023},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands},
	abstract = {Telephone speech can be characterised by a limited bandwidth, varying bitrates (in the case of mobile signals), and different speech behaviour. For vowels, formants that are situated near lower signal cut offs are shown to be affected (e.g., Künzel 2001). Investigating the effects of telephone filters is particularly relevant for forensic speaker comparisons, where wiretapped telephone conversations are commonly analyzed. However, not much is known about the effect of telephone filters on different consonants. 

In the current work, we investigated fricative /s/, which has been described to contain relatively high amounts of idiosyncratic information (Kavanagh, 2012; Van den Heuvel, 1996), even in narrowband telephone recordings where most of its high-frequency spectral characteristics are compromised (Smorenburg \& Heeren, 2021). We annotated >100 /s/ tokens for 60 speakers of British English from the West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED: Gold, 2020). These participants performed a forensic speech task in which they conversed over the telephone with an {\textquoteleft}accomplice{\textquoteright} and were recorded both over a microphone placed in front of them and wiretapped over the landline. 

Results show that linguistic information (effects of phonetic context and syllabic position) is compromised in telephone recordings compared to microphone recordings, but that some linguistic environments still show more between-speaker variability. Specifically, when /s/ is followed by labial sounds, speaker-classification accuracy was higher. This indicates that coarticulation contains idiosyncrasies that can be used in forensic speaker comparisons. 

References

Gold, Erica (2020). WYRED - West Yorkshire Regional English Database 2016-2019. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-854354
Künzel, H. J. (2001) Beware of the {\textquoteleft}telephone effect{\textquoteright}: the influence of telephone transmission on the measurement of formant frequencies. Forensic Linguistics 8: 80{\textendash}99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/sll.2001.8.1.80
Smorenburg, L. and Heeren, W. (2021) The distribution of speaker information in Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147(2): 979{\textendash}989. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0005845
},
	author = {Laura Smorenburg and Willemijn Heeren}
}
@article {503,
	title = {Poster: The speaker in speech {\textendash} linguistic context in forensic speaker comparisons},
	year = {2022},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands},
	abstract = {In forensic speaker comparisons, one or more disputed speech samples of an unknown speaker are typically compared to one or more speech samples of a suspect. One concern in such analyses is the effect of phonetic-linguistic context on the speech sounds sampled for comparison; many phonetic studies show that contexts affect the acoustic realization of speech sounds. For example, stressed syllables evoke more canonical pronunciations, utterance-initial speech sounds are typically produced with more effort, and talking over the telephone changes speech behaviour. 

To better understand the relevance of these acoustic effects for forensic speaker comparisons, we have been studying how segmental features that characterize speakers{\textquoteright} voices depend on what speakers are saying (NWO VIDI project 276-75-010). More specifically, how does the speaker-specificity of speech sounds depend on its direct context (Heeren, 2020, Smorenburg \& Heeren, 2020, 2021), on the speech channel (Smorenburg \& Heeren, 2022), and on the language spoken (De Boer \& Heeren, 2020; De Boer, Quen{\'e} \& Heeren, 2022). In this overview presentation we would like to share some of our main project results obtained on existing research databases (CGN, Oostdijk, 2000; D-LUCEA, Orr \& Quen{\'e}, 2017; WYRED, Gold et al., 2018), and show how our findings are relevant for and translate to forensically-realistic speech data taken from the NFI-FRIDA corpus (Van de Vloed et al., 2020).

References

Boer M.M. de, Quen{\'e} H. \& Heeren W.F.L. (2022), Long-term within-speaker consistency of filled pauses in native and non-native speech, JASA Express Letters 2(3): 035201.
Boer M.M. de \& Heeren W.F.L. (2020), Cross-linguistic filled pause realization: the acoustics of uh and um in native Dutch and non-native English, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 148(6): 3612-3622.
Gold, E., Ross, S., \& Earnshaw, K. (2018). The {\textquotedblleft}West Yorkshire Regional English Database{\textquotedblright}: Investigations into the generalizability of reference populations for forensic speaker comparison casework. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH (Vol. 2018{\textendash}Sept., pp. 2748{\textendash}2752)
Heeren W.F.L. (2020), The Effect of Word Class on Speaker-dependent Information in the Standard Dutch Vowel /a:/, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 148(4): 2028-2039.
Oostdijk, N. (2000). {\textquotedblleft}Het corpus Gesproken Nederlands,{\textquotedblright} (The Spoken Dutch Corpus), Nederlandse Taalkunde 5, 280{\textendash}284.
Orr, R., and Quen{\'e}, H. (2017). {\textquotedblleft} D-LUCEA: Curation of the UCU Accent Project data,{\textquotedblright} in CLARIN in the Low Countries, edited by J. Odijk and A. van Hessen ( Ubiquity Press, Berkeley), pp. 177{\textendash}190.
Smorenburg B.J.L. \& Heeren W.F.L. (2020), The distribution of speaker information in Dutch fricatives /s/ and /x/ from telephone dialogues, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147(2): 949-960.
Smorenburg B.J.L. \& Heeren W.F.L. (2021), Acoustic and speaker variation in Dutch /n/ and /m/ as a function of phonetic context and syllabic position, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 150(2).
Smorenburg L. \& Heeren W.F.L. (2022),  The effect of linguistic contexts on the acoustics and strength-of-evidence of /s/. Proceedings 30th annual conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, p. 21-22.
Van der Vloed, D., Bouten, J., Kelly, F., \& Alexander, A. (2018). NFI-FRIDA{\textendash}Forensically realistic interdevice audio database and intial experiments. In 27th Annual Conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) (pp. 25-27).
},
	author = {Willemijn Heeren and Meike de Boer and Laura Smorenburg}
}
@article {490,
	title = {Prosodic expression of sarcasm in L2 English after explicit training},
	year = {2021},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {online},
	abstract = {Sarcasm occurs frequently in everyday interactions and is typically expressed via prosody. However, speakers usually experience difficulty with expressing sarcasm prosodically in a second language. Recent research by Smorenburg and co-authors has shown that short prosodic training can already improve perceived sarcasm in Dutch learners of English (L2E learners). It remains to be investigated what exactly have changed in the prosodic production after training. 

In this study, we analysed the production of sarcastic prosody by L2E learners (N =12) before and after the training in Smorenburg et al.{\textquoteright}s study. The production data were elicited via a simulated telephone conversation task in which the participants were prompted to give a sarcastic response to a friend{\textquoteright}s remark. Mean pitch, maximum, minimum pitch, duration were extracted from the key word of each response (e.g. {\textquoteleft}healthy{\textquoteright} in {\textquoteleft}She is a healthy lady) using ProsodyPro and were subsequently analysed using linear mixed-effect modelling. 

We have found that prosodic improvement depended on utterance type and gender. The training helped L2E learners to lengthen duration in declaratives and tag-questions but not in wh-exclamatives and lower mean pitch and minimum pitch across utterance types to sound more sarcastic, similar to native speakers of English. Male L2E learners lengthened duration to a larger extent than female L2E learners, similar to female native speakers of English; female L2 learners did not lower mean pitch more than male L2 learners, different from female native speakers of English. We will discuss the nature of the prosodic improvement: L1 transfer and/or L2 learning.
},
	author = {Zandee, Femke and Jansen, Nelleke and Laura Smorenburg and Aoju Chen}
}
@article {14,
	title = {Articulatory control parameters of phonological contrasts: the case of cue-weighting for Dutch /ɑ/ - /a/},
	year = {2016},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {Utrecht, Nederland},
	abstract = {<p>Speech-language acquisition involves learning the speech sounds of the language at hand as well as which acoustic cues are relevant to differentiate them. For example, the Dutch vowels /ɑ/ and /a/ in the words {\textquoteright}man{\textquoteright} (man) and {\textquoteright}maan{\textquoteright} (moon) differ both in their spectral properties (F1 and F2 are both higher for /a/) and in duration (longer for /a/). Perception experiments indicate that the way in which different perceptual cues are being combined and weighted is language specific, however, there are large individual differences in cue weighting within language groups (Escudero, Benders, \&amp; Lipsky, 2009). Furthermore, the different perceptual cues are not entirely independent from a speech acoustics point of view, meaning that one of the cues could play a more prominent role underneath. The present study combines measurements of perceptual weighting of acoustic cues for the Dutch /ɑ/ - /a/ vowel contrast with measurements of perceptual acuity for spectral and durational differences and measurements of the production of the vowel contrast to unravel (1) what exactly influences how perceptual cues are being weighted, and (2) which cue is actively being manipulated by speakers. 45 young adult speakers of Dutch (age 19-29) participated in the study. Data analysis is currently underway; detailed results will be available at the symposium. References Escudero, P., Benders, T., \&amp; Lipski, S. C. (2009). Native, non-native and L2 perceptual cue weighting for Dutch vowels: The case of Dutch, German, and Spanish listeners. Journal of Phonetics, 37(4), 452-465.</p>
},
	author = {Hayo Terband and Lydia Bax and Peter Hart and Manou van Montfort and Sapna Sehgal and Laura Smorenburg and Fleur Versteeg and Tom Lentz}
}
