Research

Our research covers areas of phonetics, phonology, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, acoustics, and the application of these fields to forensic speech science. Within forensic speech science our work focuses on:

  • LAAP (language analysis in the asylum process)
  • understanding ear-witness performance
  • speaker comparison:
    • understanding the relationship between phonetic analysis and automatic speaker recognition
    • identifying good discriminatory features of voice, speech and language
    • testing the effects of different hardware and software on acoustic analysis results
    • testing the inter- and independence of features
    • speaker comparison with bilingual speakers
    • exploring the relationship between phonetic features and the parameters extracted in automatic speaker recognition.

We are engaged in several funded projects, many in collaboration with partners outside York including Nuance and Aculab.