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In forensic speaker identification, the expert typically compares questioned and known voice samples to help determine whether the questioned voice has come from the known speaker. Usually the questioned sample is from an offender and the known sample from a suspect, and the beneficiary is a fact-finder, e.g. judge or jury, or an investigating authority, e.g. police.   One popular acoustic-phonetic feature in forensic semi-automatic speaker recognition – its mean and standard deviation values reportedly used by 94% and 72% of forensic voice comparison experts world-wide – is fundamental frequency (F0), the acoustic reflex of the rate of vibration of the […]

A challenge facing phonological theories is that many analyses result in fairly abstract solutions. The typical situation arises when “the same” element behaves differently, depending on the context. There are numerous examples; a few are given here. In Barrow Inupiaq, the vowel either triggers palatalization or assimilates to other vowels but never both: this has been treated as two distinct underlying representations converging on a single surface form (Kaplan 1981, Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1994) In Polish, non-alternating CC-final forms and non-alternating CC-final forms both contrast with the alternating CC~CC final forms, leading to the hypothesis of yers, “vowels” at the ends […]