HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Justin Lo (Lancaster)

Title: Multilingualism in forensic voice comparison

Presenter(s): Justin Lo (Lancaster)

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 12pm to 1pm

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

The area of forensic speech science regularly interacts with multilingual speakers and communities in various legal and investigative settings, yet issues related to multilingualism have received little attention in the context of forensic voice comparison, the most common type of casework undertaken by practitioners of the field. In this talk, I will introduce the task of forensic voice comparison and present an overview of the theoretical, methodological and practical challenges that arise when we situate the task within a multilingual context. Focusing on the particular case of cross-language voice comparisons, I will further present empirical findings on the effect of language mismatch on the speaker-discriminatory potential of automatic and linguistic-phonetic features. I will conclude with reflections on future research directions in this area.