Identical twins, different voices

Authors

  • Francis Nolan University of Cambridge
  • Tomasina Oh University of Cambridge

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v3i1.39

Keywords:

Twins' speech, speaker identification, phonetics, resonants.

Abstract

The differences between voices are often broadly categorized as either 'organic' or 'learned', implying that some are determined by our anatomical inheritance, and others by what we copy from people around us or choose in order to mark our individuality. It is normally impossible, however, to assign observable differences to one source or the other, since neither source is experimentally controllable. In the case of identical twins, nature provides such a control. It can reasonably be assumed that the anatomical differences within a pair of identical twins are minimal. Differences between their voices, if any, may be attributed to 'learning' and, furthermore, if the twins have grown up in the same environment, to choices rather than to direct imitation. This paper presents a study of the /l/ and /r/ phonemes of three pairs of identical twins.

Author Biographies

  • Francis Nolan, University of Cambridge
    FRANCIS NOLAN is a lecturer in Phonetics at the University of Cambridge. He has particular interests in speaker characterization, as reflected in the title of his 1983 book The Phonetic Bases of Speaker Recognition, and he has acted in a number of court cases involving speaker identification. Other interests include phonetic reductions in connected speech, theories of speech production, and intonation.
  • Tomasina Oh, University of Cambridge
    TOMASINA OH completed her BA in Linguistics at the University of Science (Malaysia), and has an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, which included work on differences in the speech of identical twins. She is currently doing Ph.D. research in the Experimental Psychology Department at Cambridge on language disorders in schizophrenics.

Published

1996-06-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Nolan, F., & Oh, T. (1996). Identical twins, different voices. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 3(1), 39-49. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v3i1.39