Different influences of the native language of a listener on speaker recognition

Authors

  • Olaf Köster University of Trier
  • Niels O. Schiller Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v4i1.18

Keywords:

forensic phonetics, speaker identification, voice line-ups, recognition memory for foreign voices, language familiarity, typological influences

Abstract

In forensic phonetics, lay or expert witnesses might be confronted with voice samples for auditory evaluation from a language they do not understand. In speaker identification experiments, it has been shown that knowledge of the target language affects recognition results. Köster et al. (1995) showed that German listeners and English listeners with a knowledge of German identified a German voice better than English listeners without knowledge of German. Replicating the same experiment with Spanish and Chinese listeners, the results of this study show that (a) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German obtain significantly better recognition results than their compatriots with no knowledge of the target language, and that (b) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German perform significantly worse than native Germans and English listeners with a knowledge of German. No clear evidence was found that the typological difference between the native language of the listener and the target language influenced recognition performance.

Author Biographies

  • Olaf Köster, University of Trier
    OLAF KÖSTER received his MA in phonetics, German and English philology from the University of Trier (1994). Since 1994 he has been working on a project on the evaluation of glottal parameters by means of digital high-speed filming, funded by the 'Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz fur Innovation'. Parallel to the work on his PhD, he is a teacher of German phonetics for foreign students at Trier University. His research interests focus on forensic phonetics and voice disorders.
  • Niels O. Schiller, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
    NIELS O. SCHILLER received his MA in phonetics, German philology and computational linguistics from the University of Trier in 1994. In 1994 he was awarded a scholarship from the German Max Planck Society. He is now working on his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research interests include speech production, articulatory phonetics, and forensic phonetics.

Published

1997-07-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Köster, O., & Schiller, N. O. (1997). Different influences of the native language of a listener on speaker recognition. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 4(1), 18-28. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v4i1.18