Language Dependency of /s/ Production: Native Dutch Versus Non-Native English

With forensic recordings being collected in multiple languages increasingly often, this study investigates the language dependency of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in speakers of native (L1) Dutch and non-native (L2) English. Due to phonetic similarity between the languages, Dutch learners of English may exhibit language-independent /s/ acoustics, making it an interesting feature for multilingual forensic speaker comparisons (FSCs). However, the findings show that out of the four spectral moments, center of gravity, standard deviation ( SD), skewness, and kurtosis, only SD remained stab... Mehr ...

Verfasser: de Boer, Meike M.
Heeren, Willemijn F. L.
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
Reihe/Periodikum: Language and Speech ; ISSN 0023-8309 1756-6053
Verlag/Hrsg.: SAGE Publications
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27449241
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00238309241242114

With forensic recordings being collected in multiple languages increasingly often, this study investigates the language dependency of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in speakers of native (L1) Dutch and non-native (L2) English. Due to phonetic similarity between the languages, Dutch learners of English may exhibit language-independent /s/ acoustics, making it an interesting feature for multilingual forensic speaker comparisons (FSCs). However, the findings show that out of the four spectral moments, center of gravity, standard deviation ( SD), skewness, and kurtosis, only SD remained stable across the languages; the other measurements were language-dependent. The results were largely independent of the /s/ tokens’ contexts, although an interaction between language and context was found for skewness and kurtosis: With a labial right phonetic neighbor, language dependency was largely reduced. The findings have implications for FSCs: as /s/ is language-dependent in speakers of L1 Dutch and L2 English, it shows limited potential for cross-linguistic speaker comparisons in forensic casework.