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
transcription of forensic audio materials and other legal audio recordings
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 Oxford Wave Research and the Netherlands Forensic Institute.
Towards improving transcripts of audio recordings in the criminal justice system (2025-2026, ESRC, £106,413)
You’re having me on: assessing deepfake audio performance across regional and L2 dialects of English (2025-2026, IAFPA)
YorVoice (2024-2027, University of York Sparks funding)
Panjabi-English in Bradford and Leicester - creating a resource for practitioners and testing automatic transcription with non-Anglo speech (2023-2025, IAFPA)
Person-specific ASR (2022-2025, ESRC, £996,362)
Anatomy, acoustics, and the individual: Investigating inter-speaker vocal tract variation for forensic speaker comparison (2019-2023, British Academy, £288,990)
The use and utility of localised speech forms in determining identity: forensic and sociophonetic perspectives. (2016-2019, ESRC, £843,895)
Voice and Identity: source, filter, biometric (2015-2019, AHRC, £892,210)
Modelling features for forensic speaker comparison (2013-2015, British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, £9,848)
Identifying correlations between speech parameters for forensic speaker comparisons (2013-2014, IAFPA)
The identification of British English accents using prosodic features (2013-2014, IAFPA)
You came TO DIE?! (2012-2015, Australian Research Council, AUS$501,000)
AISEB - Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border (2008-2011, ESRC, £608,303)
Construction des Connaissances Langagières, Diversité des Usages, Contextes Sociolinguistiques ("Diverlang")(2006-2010, ANR, €230,000)
Phonological Database of Scottish English (2006-2008, IAFPA, €2,200)
A sociolinguistic and acoustic analysis of filled pauses in English (2003-2004, IAFPA)
BBfor2 (Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics) (2010-2013, Marie Curie FP7, €3.2 million)
A Comparative Study of Language Change in Northern Englishes (2008-2013, ESRC, £204,383)
A multi-methodological approach to the instrumental phonetic and perceptual study of rhotic sounds in varieties of English (2011-2013, AHRC, £27,258)
Harrington, L., Hughes, V., Harrison, P., Foulkes, P., Wormald, J., Kelly, F. & van der Vloed, D. (2025) Variability in performance across four generations of automatic speaker recognition systems. Proceedings of Interspeech. Rotterdam, Netherlands. pp. 3993-3997.
Patman, C., Foulkes, P., McDougall, K. (2025) Evaluating the suitability of acoustic parameters for capturing breathy voice in non-pathological female speakers. Proceedings of Interspeech. Rotterdam, Netherlands. pp. 4198-4202.
Patman, C., Foulkes, P. & McDougall, K. (2025) Acoustic methods for analysing breathy and whispery voices: a systematic review. Phonetica 82(4), pp. 271-299.
Leemann, A., Perkins, R., Buker, G.S. & Foulkes, P. (2024) An Introduction to Forensic Phonetics and Forensic Linguistics. Routledge.
Almeida, L., Gully, A. & Foulkes, P. (forthcoming) Auditory and acoustic analysis of European Portuguese by voice conversion.
Foulkes, P. & Hughes, V. (in press) Dialectological and sociolinguistic foundations of forensic speaker comparison. To appear in Nolan, F., McDougall, K. & Hudson, T. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Forensic Phonetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foulkes, P., Hughes, V., Peters, K. & Rouse, J. (under review, allegedly) The discriminative capacity of English segments in Forensic Speaker Comparison.
Harrison, P. & Wormald, J. (in press) Forensic transcription and questioned utterance analysis. To appear in Nolan, F., McDougall, K. & Hudson, T. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Forensic Phonetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hughes, V. and Kinoshita, Y. (in press) Likelihood ratio (LR) analysis, reference populations, and the presentation of conclusions. To appear in Nolan, F., McDougall, K. & Hudson, T. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Forensic Phonetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Patman, C., McDougall, K. & Foulkes, P. (submitted) The audio and visual components of speech through face coverings: investigating their impact on comprehension and speaker social evaluations.
Cao, G. W., Hughes, V., Mok, P. and Wang, B. (2024) Cross-language forensic voice comparison of Hong Kong trilingual speakers using filled pauses and an automatic speaker recognition system. Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP).
Harrington, L. & Rhodes, R. (2024) Survey on forensic transcription practices. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 31 (2): 236-266.
Hughes, V., Xu, C., Foulkes, P., Harrison, P., Welch, P., Kelly, F. & van der Vloed, D. (2024) Exploring individual speaker behaviour within a forensic automatic speaker recognition system. Proceedings of The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop (Odyssey 2024), 1-8, doi: 10.21437/odyssey.2024-1.
Kapageorgiadou, V., Zhang, M., Johnston, E., Nsiah Amoako, E., Maclennan, M., Hughes, V., Flowe, H., Nic Daéid, N. & Frumkin, L. (2024) Trust in Forensic Science Evidence Project Launch Event Report. DOI 10.17605/osf.io/uhj5c
Klug, K., Kirchhübel, C., Foulkes, P., Braun, A. & French, P. (2024) Assessing creaky voice quality for forensic purposes. Proceedings of the 2nd International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech. In Hejná, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., Eaton, M., Clasen, M., Boyd, Z. & Niebuhr, O. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2023 Aarhus International Conference on Voice Studies (SEFOS). Sciendo/DeGruyter, pp. 16-26.
Wang, B. and Hughes, V. (2024) Balancing validity and reliability as a function of sampling variability in forensic voice comparison. Science and Justice 64(6): 649-659.
Williams, S., Foulkes, P. & Hughes, V. (2024) Analysis of forced aligner performance on L2 English speech. Speech Communication 158, 103042.
Xu, C., Wormald, J.H., Foulkes, P., Harrison, P., Hughes, V., Welch, P., Kelly, F. & van der Vloed, D. (2024) Voice quality in telephone speech: comparing acoustic measures between VoIP telephone and high-quality recordings. Proceedings of Interspeech 2024, Kos, Greece.
Essery, R., Harrison, P. and Hughes, V. (2023) Evaluation of a forensic automatic speaker recognition system with emotional speech recordings. Proceedings of Interspeech. Dublin, Ireland. pp. 2568-2572.
Harrington, L. (2023) Incorporating automatic speech recognition methods into the transcription of police-suspect interviews: factors affecting automatic performance. Frontiers in Communication, 8 (Capturing Talk).
Harrington, L. and Hughes, V. (2023) Automatic speech recognition: system variability within a sociolinguistically homogeneous group of speakers. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). Prague, Czechia. pp. 3131-3135.
Hughes, V., Cardoso, A., Foulkes, P., French, P., Gully, A. & Harrison, P. (2023) Speaker-specificity in speech production: the contribution of source and filter. Journal of Phonetics 97: 101224.
Hughes, V., Wormald, J.H., Foulkes, P., Harrison, P., Kelly, F., van der Vloed, D., Welch, P. & Xu, C. (2023) Automatic speaker recognition with variation across vocal conditions: a controlled experiment with implications for forensics. Proceedings of Interspeech, Dublin.
Kirchhübel, C., Brown, G. & Foulkes, P. (2023a) What does method validation look like for forensic voice comparison by a human expert? Science and Justice 63(2): 251-257.
Kirchhübel, C., Brown, G. & Foulkes, P. (2023b) Realistic solutions for practising forensic scientists – a response to Morrison (2023). Science and Justice 63(5): 635-637.
Nutall, B., Harrison, P. and Hughes, V. (2023) Automatic speaker recognition performance with matched and mismatched female bilingual speech data. Proceedings of Interspeech. Dublin, Ireland. pp. 601-605.
Schäfer, S. & Foulkes, P. (2023) Towards a screening test for earwitnesses: investigating the individual voice recognition skills of lay listeners. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 30(2): 234-267.
Haworth, K., Tompkinson, J., Richardson, E., Deamer, F. & Hamann, M. (2023) “For the Record”: applying linguistics to improve evidential consistency in police investigative interview records. Frontiers in Communication 8, 1178516.
Tompkinson, J. (2023) Spoken Threats from Production to Perception. Cambridge University Press.
Williams, S., Hughes, V. & Foulkes, P. (2023) Acoustic analysis of L2 English phonemes for language identification. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Prague, Czech Republic.
Wormald, J.H., Foulkes, P., Harrison, P., Hughes, V., Kelly, F., van der Vloed, D. & Xu, C. (2023) Sensitivity of x-vectors and automatic speaker recognition scores to vocal variation. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Prague, Czech Republic.
Xu, C., Foulkes, P., Harrison, P., Hughes, V. & Wormald, J.H. (2023) Contributions of acoustic measures to the classification of laryngeal voice quality in continuous English speech. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Prague, Czech Republic.
Gibb-Reid, B., Foulkes, P. & Hughes, V. (2022) Exploring the phonetic variation of ‘yeah’ and ‘like’. York Papers in Linguistics Series 2, 18: 1-27.
Gibb-Reid, B., Foulkes, P., Hughes, V. & Walker, T. (2022). Just listen: Describing phonetic variation in the word just. In R. Billington (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, pp. 226-230.
Gully, A., Harrison, P., Hughes, V., Rhodes, R. and Wormald, J. (2022) How voice analysis can help solve crimes. Frontiers in Young Minds 10: 702664.
Wang, X., Hughes, V. & Foulkes, P. (2022) The effect of sampling variability on systems and individual speakers in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison. Speech Communication 138: 38-49.
Coy, T., Hughes, V., Harrison, P. and Gully, A. (2021) A comparison of the accuracy of Dissen and Keshets’s (2016) DeepFormants and traditional LPC methods for semi-automatic speaker recognition. Proceedings of Interspeech. Brno, Czech Republic. pp. 406-410. *Differences in LLR output for each of the LPC systems relative to DeepFormants, for each speaker are displayed here
Harrington, L., Hughes, V. and Rhodes, R. (2021) Style variability in disfluency analysis for forensic speaker comparison. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 28(1): 31-58. [Author version]
Hudson, T., McDougall, K. and Hughes, V. (2021) Forensic phonetics. In Setter, J. and Knight, R-A. (eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics. Cambridge: CUP. pp. 631-656.
Morrison, G. S., Enzinger, E., Hughes, V., Jessen, M., Meuwly, D., Neumann, C., Planting, S., Thompson, W., van der Vloed, D., Ypma, R. and Zhang, C. (2021) Consensus on validation of forensic voice comparison. Science and Justice 61(3): 299-309.
Wang, B. and Hughes, V. (2021) System performance as a function of calibration methods, sample size and sample variability in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison. Proceedings of Interspeech. Brno, Czech Republic. pp. 381-385.
Bradshaw, L., Hughes, V. & Chodroff, E. (2020) Investigating the forensic applications of global and local temporal representations of speech for dialect discrimination. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020. [pdf]
Hughes, V., Clermont, F. and Harrison, P. (2020) Correlating cepstra with formant frequencies: implications for phonetically-informed forensic voice comparison. Proceedings of Interspeech. Shanghai, China. pp. 1857-1862.
Hughes, V. & Wormald, J. (2020) Sharing innovative methods, data and knowledge across sociophonetics and forensic speech science. Linguistics Vanguard 6(1), special issue on Innovative Methods in Sociophonetics. [Author version]
Atkinson, Nathan (2015) Variable factors affecting voice identification in forensic contexts. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Brown, Georgina (2014) Y-ACCDIST: an automatic accent recognition system for forensic applications. MA dissertation, University of York.
Brown, Georgina (2017) Considering accent recognition technology for forensic applications. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Fecher, Natalie (2014) Effects of forensically-relevant facial concealment on acoustic and perceptual properties of consonants. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Gibb-Reid, Ben (2024) Investigating the phonetic properties of word tokens in interactional contexts and the implications for Forensic Voice Comparison. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Gold, Erica (2014) Calculating likelihood ratios for forensic speaker comparisons using phonetic and linguistic parameters. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Harrington, Lauren (2024) Towards improving transcripts of audio recordings in the criminal justice system. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Harrison, Philip (2013) Making accurate formant measurements: an empirical investigation of the influence of the measurement tool, analysis settings and speaker on formant measurement. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Hoskin, James (2022) Language analysis in the asylum context: towards more robust and transparent procedures for LADO. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Hughes, Vincent (2014) The definition of the relevant population and the collection of data for likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Kavanagh, Colleen (2012) New consonantal acoustic parameters for forensic speaker comparison. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Kelly, Sarah (2018) Investigating the phonetic and linguistic features used by speakers to communicate an intent to harm. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Kirchhuebel, Christin (2013) The acoustic and temporal characteristics of deceptive speech. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Klug, Katharina (2023) Assessing a speaker’s voice quality for forensic purposes: Using the example of creaky voice and breathy voice. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Lindh, Jonas (2017) Forensic comparison of voices, speech and speakers: tools and methods in forensic phonetics. PhD dissertation, University of Gothenburg.
Lo, Justin (2021) Issues of bilingualism in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Rhodes, Richard (2012) Assessing the strength of non-contemporaneous forensic speech evidence. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Roberts, Lisa (2012) Vocal responses of individuals in distress. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Schäfer, Sascha (2024) The Individual Lay Listener as a Variable in Speaker Individualisation Tasks. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Suthar, Nikita (2023) Within-formant spectral feature analysis for forensic speaker discrimination casework: A study of 45 Marwari monolinguals from Bikaner, India. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Tompkinson, James (2018) Assessing the influence of phonetic variation on the perception of spoken threats. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Wang, Bruce (2021) The effect of sampling on individual speakers and system performance in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Williams, Samantha (2024) Interpretable by design: An interpretability-centred approach to automatic L1 identification from L2 English speech. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Wilson, Kim (2016) Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO): An investigative study. MPhil dissertation, University of York.
Wood, Grace (2018) Accents on trial: accent discrimination in UK and US courts. PhD dissertation, University of York.
Wormald, Jessica (2016) Regional variation in Panjabi-English. PhD dissertation, University of York.