International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law

Global interest meets new perspectives

Annina Heini — 2022-07-08

Report of the 15th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, hosted by the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, UK

Book announcements

Richard Powell — 2022-07-08

Suspects’ opportunities to claim their legal rights in police investigative interviews

Aafke Diepeveen — 2022-07-08

When interviewed by the police, suspects are to be informed that they have the right to remain silent and the right to obtain the assistance of a defence counsel. This article presents a conversation analytic study of how it is established in interaction whether a suspect wants to go through with the interview or end it by invoking their legal rights. The data is a corpus of audio recordings of authentic police interviews conducted in Norway. First, we present a quantitative measure of how often suspects are asked explicit questions about whether they want to exercise their right to silence and/or to legal counsel. Second, we investigate variation in the design of such questions, concentrating specifically on expressions involving a preference for one response option over the other. Third, we discuss formulations used while presenting the rights that may legitimise or inhibit a free and independent decision. The results show that suspects are often not asked to take a stance on their rights, and when they are, such questions often involve a bias towards waiving their rights. And although some officers explicitly inform the suspects that they are free to choose whatever option they like, others provide information about the interview that either presupposes willingness to talk or presents the option of waiving one’s rights as preferable to invoking them. These findings have important implications for the safeguarding of suspects’ rights and form the basis for recommendations to the police about how to give suspects the opportunity to take a stance on their legal rights.

A segmentally informed solution to automatic accent classification and its advantages to forensic applications

Georgina Brown — 2022-07-08

Traditionally, work in automatic accent recognition has followed a similar research trajectory to that of language identification, dialect identification and automatic speaker recognition. The same acoustic modelling approaches that have been implemented in speaker recognition (such as GMM-UBM and i-vector-based systems) have also been applied to automatic accent recognition. These approaches form models of speakers’ accents by taking acoustic features from right across the speech signal without knowledge of its phonetic content. Particularly for accent recognition, however, phonetic information is expected to add substantial value to the task. The current work presents an alternative modelling approach to automatic accent recognition, which forms models of speakers’ pronunciation systems using segmental information. This article claims that such an approach to the problem makes for a more explainable method and therefore is a more appropriate method to deploy in settings where it is important to be able to communicate methods, such as forensic applications. We discuss the issue of explainability and show how the system operates on a large 700-speaker dataset of non-native English conversational telephone recordings.

Process, tools and agendas in LADO

Yaron Matras — 2022-07-08

After recapitulating my arguments about methodological flaws in the practices of the company Verified AB in language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO) in asylum procedures, I respond to criticisms of my proposals for an alternative protocol and review the relevance of qualifications, control samples, language variation and scales. I then discuss the interplay of professional competence, ideological bias and understandings of the task and demonstrate the pitfalls of the pre-set framing of the question of the applicants’ background.

Jack Windsor Lewis (7 August 1926–11 July 2021)

Peter French — 2022-07-08

Language maintenance in Malaysia

Teresa Wai See Ong — 2022-07-08

Cross-currents

Dima Rusho — 2022-07-08

Police and the Policed: Language and Power Relations on the Margins of the Global South by Danielle Watson (2019)

Zhengrui Han — 2022-07-08

Police and the Policed: Language and Power Relations on the Margins of the Global South by Danielle Watson (2019)
Palgrave Macmillan, xiii + 138 pp