bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Relative Prevalence of Various Spiritual Needs
Authors: Flannelly Kevin , Galek Kathleen , Bucchino John , Vane Adam
Published: March 2015

An announcement was placed in a chaplaincy newsletter inviting chaplains from the United States and Canada to participate in a survey about the spiritual needs of their patients. A total of 167 chaplains responded to the invitation and completed an on-line questionnaire. The questionnaire listed 28 spiritual needs that fell into seven categories. Chaplains were asked to rate how often they encountered patients with each of the needs, using a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 meaning “a few times a year” and 6 meaning “many times a day.” The responses of chaplains indicated that the seven categories formed a hierarchy of needs. The most common, or prevalent, of the seven spiritual needs were the need for love and belonging, and the need to find meaning and purpose, which chaplains encountered between “many times a week” to “a few times a day.”
'Reasonable man' and 'reasonable doubt': the English language, Anglo culture and Anglo-American law
Authors: Wierzbicka Anna
Published: March 2015

This paper investigates, in a historical and cultural perspective, the meaning of the word reasonable, and in particular, of the phrases reasonable man and reasonable doubt, which play an important role in Anglo-American law. Drawing on studies of the British Enlightenment such as Porter (2000), it traces the modern English concept of ‘reasonableness’ back to the intellectual revolution brought about by the writings of John Locke, who (as Porter says) ‘replaced rationalism with reasonableness, in a manner which became programmatic for the Enlightenment in Britain’. The paper also argues that the meaning of the word reasonable has changed over the last two centuries and that as a result, the meaning of the phrases reasonable man and beyond reasonable doubt has also changed; but since these phrases were continually used for over two centuries and became entrenched in Anglo-American law as well as in ordinary language, and since the older meaning of reasonable is no longer known to most speakers, the change has, generally speaking, gone unnoticed. On a theoretical level, the paper argues that meaning cannot be investigated in a precise and illuminating manner without a coherent semantic framework; and that a suitable framework is provided by the ‘NSM’ semantic theory.
Review article: Forensic Speaker Identification by P. Rose
Authors: Jessen Martin
Published: March 2015

A detailed review of Forensic Speaker Identification by P. Rose. 'Highly Recommended'
R -v- Ingram, C., Ingram, D. and Whittock, T. The Who Wants to be a Millionaire? fraud trial
Authors: French Peter , Harrison Philip
Published: March 2015

The television show, ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ (WWTBM) was created in the UK by the independent production company Celador in 1998. It is a general knowledge quiz show in which contestants have the chance to win a top prize of one million pounds. The programme has reached its fifteenth series in the UK and it runs several nights a week on the independent television network. It has been exported to over 100 countries worldwide. In March and April of 2003 two contestants and an accomplice were tried and convicted of attempting to defraud the programme of the million pound prize. Their strategy involved the contestant, after having been asked the questions, ‘thinking aloud’ about possible answers whilst an accomplice in the studio guided him towards the correct one by a system of coughing. This report describes the methods used by the authors to determine from the recordings of the programme where in the studio the coughing was coming from.
Literacy, language and the Peter Blake Principle
Authors: Brown-Blake Celia
Published: March 2015

This paper examines the implications of the distinctions between speech|and writing for the operation of a particular legal device in the Jamaican common law known as the Peter Blake principle. The principle allows a cross-examiner to test the evidence and credibility of a witness by putting a document to a witness. The witness is required to look at it and thereafter the cross-examiner will ask him questions on the|document. Issues concerning the efficacy of the principle arise where a textual document is put to a witness who is unable to read and the document is read aloud to him/her. This paper explores the nature of the possible consequences that emanate from a written to oral text conversion and their ramifications for the operation of the Peter Blake principle when it is applied in the context of a non-literate witness. It does so with particular focus on police station diaries and indicates the danger of the likelihood of a compromise of the value of this critical legal device in situations where there is a mere reading aloud to a non-literate witness, without any further adjustment, of police station diary texts
An applied genre analysis of civil judgments: the case of Mainland China
Authors: Han Zhengrui
Published: March 2015

China officially launched its ongoing judicial reform in 1997 (Jiang 1997) and since then a number of aspects of litigation have been changed. One of the notable changes occurred to judges’ writing of civil judgments, i.e. judicial opinions of civil cases, and these received the focus of examination in the present research.
Attribution and judicial control in Chinese court judgments: a corpus-based study
Authors: Cheng Le
Published: March 2015

The present corpus-based study deals with attribution in court judgments from three perspectives: the forms of appellate judgments, authorial voices in appellate judgments, and attribution to the sources of law. The results in the study are threefold. First, all the appellate judgments from Mainland China and Taiwan are the judgment of the court; both single-opinion judgments and multiple-opinion judgments are found in the appellate judgments from Hong Kong. Secondly, only institutional self-references are found in the appellate judgments of Mainland China and Taiwan. Thirdly, more divergent forms in terms of sources of law are found in Hong Kong in contrast with Mainland China and Taiwan. Through the analysis of the results obtained in this study, the author argues that in Hong Kong the individual judge's power is foregrounded and what is backgrounded is the court. In contrast, in the Mainland China and Taiwan judgments, one can only hear the voices of the court rather than those of the individual judge. The discursive presentation of focusing on different power agents can find its root in social construction, because the discursive structure is constrained by and representative of social structure.
Language rights in the minimum guarantees of fair criminal trial
Authors: Namakula Catherine S.
Published: March 2015

The linguistic dynamics of a multilingual trial are significant determinants of fair hearing. By analysing the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunals, on language and fair trial, this article attempts to situate language guarantees in the framework of the fundamental right to fair trial. If successful, this could raise the profile of the entire debate on language in international criminal trials, and hopefully instigate reform. Notably, the effective participation of a person in his/her trial is a function of language. From the information of charges, through the process of defence, examining witnesses and interpreting the evidence, language is a significant handmaid. Specifically, translation, as an indispensable component of a multilingual trial, enhances the relevance of linguistic forces to the realisation of a fair criminal trial.
Clarification of the issues in language analysis: a rejoinder to Fraser and Verrips
Authors: Cambier-Langeveld Tina
Published: March 2015

Volume 18.1 (2011) of this journal presented two responses to my article ‘The role of linguists and native speakers in language analysis for the determination of speaker origin’, published in volume 17.1 (2010). Both Helen Fraser and Maaike Verrips pick up on eight cases presented in my article, and question whether these cases have any implications for the ‘Guidelines’. The responses compel me to bring forward a direct connection between the eight cases and the ‘Guidelines’. In this rejoinder, the impact of the eight cases on the ‘Guidelines’ is spelled out. Secondly, various arguments relevant to the ‘linguist vs native speaker debate’ are distinguished, in order to increase understanding of the controversy. Finally, this rejoinder reflects on how this debate could have become polarised.
Voice line-ups: Speakers’ F0 values influence the reliability of voice recognitions
Authors: Sørensen Mette H.
Published: March 2015

This paper reports a voice line-up experiment. It was designed to explore whether some voices are easier to remember and recognise than others, and whether some listeners are better at recognising voices than others. The results suggest that ‘common’ voices, based on mean fundamental frequency values, are harder to remember and recognise than ‘less common’ voices. The results also suggest that some people are better at remembering and recognising voices than others. The results show that after one week of retention the mean percentage of correct identifications is 65%. However, the ‘less common’ voice is correctly recognised at 74%, whereas the ‘common’ voice is only correctly identified in 56% of the cases. The results not only suggest that some voices are easier to remember and recognise than others, but they also imply individual differences in listeners’ abilities to recognise voices. It turns out that it was the same listeners who had difficulties making the correct identifications in the different line-ups. An implicational hierarchy may be proposed, in which the listeners who were not able to correctly identify the ‘less common’ voice also had problems with identifying the ‘common’ voice. The results also show that the listeners’ confidence in their own ability to recognise the target voices is not a reliable measure of voice recognition performance.
Speaker-recognition ability of blind and sighted subjects
Authors: Braun Almut
Published: March 2015

Blind individuals are known to outperform sighted ones in a variety of auditory tasks. The present study was carried out to investigate whether the blind possess superior speaker-recognition abilities as well. Approximately one week after subjects were familiarised with the voice of one speaker, they had to recognise him among seven matched foils within two voice line-ups (hi-fi vs cellular telephone quality). As a result, the blind performed significantly better than the sighted under hi-fi condition (p
Language, space and the law: a study of directive signs
Authors: Mautner Gerlinde
Published: March 2015

This paper contributes to the study of linguistic landscapes by analysing warning and prohibition signs in urban settings. On the basis of data collected in British cities, it explains how directive signs reflect the interplay of language, law, space and society. Primarily conceptual in orientation but with a strong empirical base, the paper explores how the performativity of directive signs is constituted, on the one hand, by where they are placed, and, on the other, by implicit or explicit references to legal authority. By taking a socio-legal perspective, and considering the intertextual links between signs and the legal code, the paper addresses issues hitherto neglected in linguistic landscape research.
Earwitnesses: the effect of type of vocal differences on correct identification and confidence accuracy
Authors: Zetterholm Elisabeth , Sarwar Farhan , Thorvaldsson Valgeir , Allwood Carl Martin
Published: March 2015

Individual voice and speech characteristics are important for earwitness identification. A target-absent line-up with six foils was used to analyse the influence of voice and speech features on recognition. To create ecologically valid conditions for voice recognition, the present study used voices in conversation in the target event and for the foils. The participants were particularly successful in rejecting the two voice foils that were most dissimilar to the target voice in articulation rate and pitch. These two foils were also given somewhat higher confidence judgments than the other foils, although the level of that confidence was still somewhat low. In fact, participants as a collective were underconfident for these two foils but were overconfident for the other foils. In addition, they showed somewhat better ability in their confidence judgments to distinguish correct and incorrect responses for the two most dissimilar foils than for the four foils for which their identification responses were less successful. For the other four foils, which were more similar to the target voice, the participants showed in their confidence judgments very poor ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect identifications. Later positions in the parade were more often (erroneously) identified as the culprit, regardless of the specific foils used in those positions.
Judicial discourse in Cantonese courtrooms in postcolonial Hong Kong: the judge as a godfather, scholar, educator and scolding parent
Authors: Leung Janny H.C.
Published: March 2015

This paper presents how legal bilingualism, especially the use of the local language in postcolonial Hong Kong courtrooms, impacts upon judicial behaviour. Through analysing recent cases where local judges seem to be wearing many new hats, I will explore the dynamic relationship between language code and judicial practice, and argue that the use of their first language has unveiled the human side and the often non-legal ideologies of these judges, which were previously masked by a judicial formalism that the use of the ex-coloniser's language has cultivated. The cases show that the judges perform monolingual style shift and bilingual code switch as a response to their audience and referees. I will attempt to explain their verbal behaviour and describe the slow transformation of legal culture in Hong Kong as a result of its recent move towards legal bilingualism.
Language as evidence: the linguist as expert witness in North American courts
Authors: Levi Judith N.
Published: March 2015

The purpose of this article is a simple one: to give a concise but informative picture of the breadth of linguistic expertise which has been introduced into legal cases through the use of expert testimony by professional linguists in the USA and Canada. Coverage of the relevant material is organized according to major subfields of linguistics, with brief explanations of each subfield provided for readers who are not already familiar with linguistics.
Forensic linguistics in Australia: an overview
Authors: Eades Diana
Published: March 2015

This article provides an overview of expert evidence given by linguists in Australian courts. This linguistic evidence has been primarily in two areas: analysis of police records of interview, and speaker identification on taperecordings. While linguistic evidence in the latter area tends to be uncontested, most courts have ruled that linguistic evidence concerning police records of interview is not legally admissible. Increased attention from the media, the legal profession and linguists themselves appears to be pointing the way to acceptability.
Deceit, distress and false imprisonment: the anatomy of a car sales event
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: March 2015

We seldom get the opportunity to record what actually goes on in a car sales event. A deaf customer, who kept all the hand-written notes made by the salesperson and himself, provided such evidence in his civil lawsuit against the car dealer. The linguist was called in originally to validate the sequencing of the 101 written slips of paper that constituted such evidence. Using speech event analysis along with various context clues, the sequence of the notes was established. In addition, speech act analysis and topic-response analysis made clear the respective agendas of the customer and the salesperson, since a major part of the dispute concerned whether the customer was a serious, potential buyer or merely a price shopper, seeking information at that time. This article outlines the linguistic analysis that was presented at trial.
Regina versus Neil Scobie
Authors: McCelland Elizabeth
Published: March 2015

Expert opinions in voice identification cases normally differ only in degrees of certainty. This case report examines factors that led opposing experts to reach unusually disparate opinions over how far the suspect's voice matched that of the accused in a hoax bomb call. Extrapolating from the details of the defence and the prosecution experts’ analyses, the author argues that a narrowly phonetic approach to the problem of speaker identification can be misleading and that, as a general principle, phonetic data must be interpreted in the light of dialectological and sociolinguistic information.
Converting time reference in judges’ summations: a study in time reference management in a Creole continuum courtroom
Authors: Forrester Clive Roy
Published: March 2015

When witnesses take the stand in court, they attempt, for the most part, to reduce the past experience of a crime to a story. This story is usually co-created and mediated by a lawyer via examination in chief or cross examination. What can potentially emerge as a result is a series of competing narratives – different, and sometimes contradictory, versions of the same story. Judges must somehow find a way to consolidate all the competing narratives inside the courtroom before arriving at the verdict, or, in juried cases, instruct the jury on how to arrive at a final decision. This article examines the techniques the judge uses to consolidate one particular detail - time. Since the linguistic situation in Jamaica is described as a Creole continuum moving between Jamaican Creole (JC) and Standard Jamaican English (SJE), judges have the complex task of navigating markedly distinct ways of representing time both lexically and grammatically. The study explains the tense conversion technique which judges in the Jamaican courtroom use when moving between the TMA (tense mood aspect) systems of JC (input during the trial) and SJE (output during the summation). The study reveals that some tense conversions in the summation may in fact be contrary to what was the intended meaning during the testimony and as such pose a problem for interpretation.
Variability in analyst decisions during the computation of numerical likelihood ratios
Authors: Hughes Vincent , Foulkes Paul
Published: March 2015

This study assesses the extent to which likelihood ratios (LRs) are affected by analyst decisions regarding the number of reference speakers, number of tokens per speaker, and degree of linguistic match between the suspect-offender and the reference data. Using F1 and F2 trajectories from spontaneous /u?/ vowels, LRs were computed against a reference set of up to 120 speakers, and between 2 and 13 tokens per speaker. LR scores proved robust when using more than 30 speakers, although validity improved as the sample size increased. Regional dialect mismatch was found to overestimate same-speaker scores by an average of one order of log10 magnitude. For different-speaker pairs, dialect mismatch generally resulted in more false hits. The results indicate that small amounts of reference data should generally be avoided, and that an awareness of the complexity of sociophonetic variation is essential in the definition of the relevant population for voice comparison.
Linguistic politeness in lawyers’ petitions under the Confucian ideal of no litigation
Authors: Zhang Liping
Published: March 2015

In order to investigate the linguistic consequences of the humble social position of Chinese lawyers shaped under the Confucian notion of no litigation, this article examines how lawyers strategically perform requests for legal actions by magistrates. The article draws on Penman's (1990) grid of linguistic politeness strategies in court and Holmes et al.'s (2012) model of social constraints on linguistic politeness, two extensions of politeness in the Brown and Levinson (1978) tradition. I conceptualise group-face related positive and negative politeness and output strategies derived from Chinese Neo-Confucianism so as to accommodate linguistic politeness practices within the legal ‘community of practice’ (Mills 2009: 1057; Wenger 1998). A comparative discourse analysis of lawyers’ petitions captures the similarities and differences in their deployment of linguistic politeness in the past and the present when making requests threatens their face/security.
Speaker-individuality in Fujisaki model f0 features: implications for forensic voice comparison
Authors: Leeman Adrian , Mixdorff Hansjörg , O'Reilly Maria , Kolly Marie-José , Dellwo Volker
Published: March 2015

Fundamental frequency (f0) is a highly speaker-specific feature. Consequently, practitioners often use f0 information in forensic casework. Current research principally examines the use of long-term f0 statistics such as f0 means and standard deviations for forensic voice comparison. The present study investigates how short-term f0 features such as measured by the Fujisaki intonation model capture speaker-individuality. Based on data of a homogeneous group of Zurich German speakers, we conducted an experiment on a large corpus of read speech and on a subset of sentences that included speaking style variability (spontaneous vs. read). The latter is characteristic of forensic casework. Speakers demonstrated high between-speaker variability and low within-speaker variability across the two speaking styles for a number of f0 features. Given this evidence of speaker-individuality, we discuss Fujisaki f0 features’ potential for forensic voice comparison.
State-of-the-art in language analysis: a response to the chapter on LADO in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Law
Authors: Cambier-Langeveld Tina
Published: March 2015

Response to Peter L. Patrick (2012) Language Analysis for Determination of Origin: objective evidence for refugee status determination. In P. Tiersma and L. Solan (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law. Oxford University Press, 533-546.
Naive auditory identification and discrimination of similar voices by familiar listeners
Authors: Rose Phil , Duncan Sally
Published: March 2015

Experiments are described which investigate the ability of listeners to identify and distinguish between individuals with similar voices whom they know well. Subjects were tested on speech of varying duration from four familiar male speakers and two foils. Results in identification tasks range from chance for single words to almost perfect for longer utterances. Performance in discrimination is better than identification, but both show nevertheless an estimated ‘judicially fatal error’ rate of about 7 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. Correlation between subjects’ accuracy and confidence in their judgements is demonstrated. Results indicate that some voices, and some tokens of the same utterance, may differ in their recognizability. Forensic implications are discussed.
A new jitter-algorithm to quantify hoarseness: an exploratory study
Authors: Wagner Isolde
Published: March 2015

This paper presents an empirical study of the validity and reliability of a new method to quantify hoarseness or roughness of the voice by measuring vocal jitter which refers to the temporal irregularities of the vibration process of the vocal folds. Whereas it is quite possible to measure jitter in recordings of sustained vowels elicited in laboratory conditions, there seems to be no reliable method of measuring it in connected speech. This problem arises in forensic speaker identification (S I), where speech samples from non-cooperative speakers have to be analysed . Therefore a new jitter-algorithm which was specifically developed for application in forensic SI is rested. Seven male German speakers with different kinds of pathological hoarseness and seven speakers with normal voices served as subjects. The results show that the algorithm reliably measures jitter not only based on isolated vowels bur also based on vowels in connected speech, thus allowing for quantification of an additional parameter in forensic SI.
Language in legal contexts: The ‘why’ question
Authors: Gibbons John
Published: March 2015

It may be useful to indicate briefly the manner in which this particular conference helped to shape the nature of these papers, and the particular underlying issue that they all, in very different ways, address. Many years ago, Fishman (1965) asked the fundamental question that still underpins much work in macro-sociolinguistics and in style and register analysis: ‘who speaks what language to whom, and when?’ But this leaves unasked, and therefore unanswered, the critical question ‘why?’ The reasons and motives for language behaviour, and the factors which cause language in legal contexts to differ from everyday conversational language, can largely be found in attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, and in culture in general. The papers collected here look at language in a wide range of legal contexts, but all of them examine the world view and patterns of thought that lie behind the language.
The use of interpreters in court
Authors: Carroll John
Published: March 2015

Given the large number of Australians who speak English as a second language one would expect there to be significant use of interpreters in Australian courts. However there is a marked difference in the use of interpreters between different courts and tribunals, and overall usage appears to be very low. The reasons for the low level of usage in some jurisdictions appears to relate nor only to the law on whether to allow access to interpreters, bur also to the beliefs and attitudes of participants in the legal process, particularly the belief that a court will find it more difficult to assess the credibility of witnesses and to ascertain the truth if an interpreter is used. Greater attention is needed to ensure that witnesses can understand and be understood when giving evidence in Court.
Chinese evidence versus the institutionalized power of English
Authors: Wu Weiping
Published: March 2015

Based on actual court cases involving Chinese tapes surreptitiously recorded by the US government, I examined the complications in using Chinese as evidence in court where English has the institutionalized power. Findings from my analysis suggest that: (1) overlooking certain linguistic features in Chinese when translating can lead to questions about the credibility of evidence used in court; (2) social and cultural factors associated with Chinese are often neglected in the legal setting where ‘the evidence’ is language and ‘language only’; and (3) special problems due to the use of Chinese as evidence in court are yet to be realized by judges, jurors and lawyers. I focus on three features that were neglected by English-speaking people dealing with legal cases involving Chinese: polysemy. tense, and the use of obscene language and kinship terms. The first two are linguistic, while the third one is basically a feature associated with cultural knowledge. I argue that, due to the close link between the culture and society in which a language is used, the understanding of Chinese inevitably involves a certain degree of knowledge about the Chinese culture and society. Because of the power of the framework within which we process incoming data and the lack of such a framework for key players in the US court system, it is easy for them to misinterpret the meaning of what was actually said in the conversation in Chinese. To remedy such a situation, I suggest that (1) certain procedures be followed in preparing the English transcription for court use, and (2) courts use an expert witness in cases involving Chinese whenever possible.
The problem of F0 and real-life speaker identification: a case study
Authors: Boss Dagmar
Published: March 2015

While it is well known that fundamental frequency of voice can be an important cue in speaker identification and verification in the laboratory, its use is not so effective in the field. This idea is supported by the report of a relevant case. Specifically, the holdup of a gas station by an adult male was video taped by a monitoring camera. When the voice of the criminal was measured, it was found to be very high-pitched; his mean fundamental frequency was 228 Hz. Later, when the criminal was arrested, his ‘normal’ mean fundamental frequency was determined to be only 140 Hz. The difference here is of considerable magnitude. It is a relationship which often is found in the forensic field. That is, we have come to expect differences between the original and the reference samples of a speaker's mean fundamental frequency because, when the original material is recorded, the speaker can be under highly stressed emotional states and this occurrence has a great influence on his or her F0. These possible situational differences must be taken into account in forensic investigations.
A report on the acoustic effects of one type of disguise
Authors: Figueiredo Ricardo Molina de , Souza Britto Helena
Published: March 2015

Consideration of the many kidnapping cases in Brazil has led to the conclusion that criminals sometimes try to disguise their voices by speaking with a pen or pencil between their from teeth, a condition which places it in a perpendicular line to the sagittal plane. These settings interact among themselves and also with the speaker's basic articulatory setting yielding acoustic effects that are not easy to interpret. This is because different speech segments will be affected in differing degrees, depending on their greater or lesser susceptibility. The acoustic alterations resulting from the type of disguise discussed can be rather misleading for the forensic phonetician. They can cause him to wrongly establish the speaker's dialectal profile, especially since some relevant cues may be masked. This report examines the formant shifts for Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels which occur when the specified disguise is used. The results show that there are significant differences in the quality of the vowels. Perceptually, the most evident effect is the lowering of the high vowels. It is hoped that the discussion to follow will aid the forensic phonetician in upgrading his speaker identification skills.
Evaluation of a foreign speaker in forensic phonetics: a report
Authors: Schiller Niels O. , Koster Olaf
Published: March 2015

Expert witnesses in phonetics find themselves more and more often in forensic situations in which they have to identify the voice of a speaker who does not speak their native language. Until recently, little has been known about the role which the native language background of the listener plays in such speaker identification tasks. In this report, several aspects of an experimental investigation on the influence of native-language background on speaker identification are reviewed. Results of a first experiment are reported and some follow-up experiments currently being carried our are described within that context.
The influence of style-shifting on voice identification
Authors: Bahr Ruth Huntley , Pass Kimberley J.
Published: March 2015

Alterations in speaking style, and associated problems, are commonly found in criminal investigations. Typically, the recorded samples have been made in two different environments; during the crime and then during police questioning. These inherent differences in situation, lead to the possibility that the style of speech also is changed. This project was developed to evaluate one of the problems that results, that is, the influence of code-switching on speaker identification. To this end, voice samples representing casual, extemporaneous and formal conditions were elicited from five African-American males and presented to naive listeners in a paired comparison listening task of speaker recognition. It was found that the type of speaker's utterance had a significant impact on the identification judgements. That is, if an individual was represented by two different styles of speech, they were more likely to be identified as different people than if they were compared within the same condition. Hence, it can be concluded that code-switching, as induced by changes in the social situation and recording environment, may result in the misidentification of a particular speaker.
Earwitness identification: common ground, disputed territory and uncharted areas
Authors: Broeders A.P.A.
Published: March 2015

In the last decade there has been a growing interest in the questions raised by the auditory identification of persons by victims and witnesses. Within IAFP, the International Association for Forensic Phonetics, this has led to the call for guidelines or criteria for identification procedures such as the voice line-up. Against this background, parallels and contrasts with the more widely studied field of visual identification are discussed, as are a number of (un)resolved issues and/or misconceptions surrounding voice line-up procedure. These include the use of repeated trials, blank trials, familiar vs. unfamiliar voices, the use of actors, verbatim text or transcripts, and the notions of propitious heterogeneity and ecphoric similarity. Accepted notions are critically examined. The dearth of estimator-variable research is noted.
Fundamental frequency vector for a speaker identification system
Authors: Jiang Ming
Published: March 2015

Speaking Fundamental Frequency (SFF) is a measure of the rate of opening and closing of the vocal cords. Among other things, it reveals speaker-dependent patterns and is important in the task of speaker identification. In fact, experiments conducted at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Communication Processes (IASCP) at the University of Florida have demonstrated its role in the identification process. Many techniques are available for obtaining SFF measurements; this research involved three of them. They include: (1) Cepstrum SFF extraction (CEP), (2) the Computerized Speech Lab (CSL) and (3) a Fundamental Frequency Indicator (FFI) . The Cepstrum method is a software approach designed to obtain SFF, CSL is a multifunction speech signal processor that includes a function for SFF extraction and FFI is a specially designed device used to extract an accurate measure of SFF on a continuous basis. These techniques were compared by means of an identification procedure involving three types of transmission conditions and a large population of male subjects. The results showed that the best way to obtain the SFF vector is the FFI method which employed alone yielded an 80 per cent overall correct identification rate for high quality recordings, 76 per cent for noise-added recording conditions and 90 per cent over the telephone line.
Psycho-linguistic analysis of tax judgments
Authors: McLeod Neil
Published: March 2015

Each of us constructs an individual ‘model of reality’. Language is one of the ways we describe our perceptions of reality to each other. In using language to describe reality, we are presented with a range of ‘surface’ linguistic forms. Some of these forms enable us to avoid dealing directly with aspects of reality we are aware of but feel uncomfortable about. Other forms appeal to us because they enable us to avoid confronting aspects of reality that we are not aware of, aspects of reality that our individual models do not take appropriate account of. This paper examines judgements in a range of Australian tax cases. It focuses on the linguistic forms that enable judges to avoid confronting inappropriate aspects of the judicial model of income tax jurisprudence.
A different story: narrative versus ‘question and answer’ in Aboriginal evidence
Authors: Cooke Michael
Published: March 2015

The question and answer (QjA) interview style, typical in police interviews of suspects and in the courtroom examination of witnesses, presents serious difficulties to those for whom the QJA format is unfamiliar or alien. In the case of Aboriginal people from remote communities in the northern regions of Australia, this difficulty is compounded by communication problems when interviews are conducted in English without an interpreter's assistance. Such evidence is usually marred by frequent instances of gratuitous concurrence and ‘scaffolding’. In this paper, sections of transcript of both the police interview and courtroom testimony are analysed to highlight the communication difficulties that many Aboriginal people experience in a QJA interview compared to when they are permitted to tell their own story.
The effect of removing linguistic information upon identifying speakers of a foreign language
Authors: Schiller Niels O. , Köster Olaf , Duckworth Martin
Published: March 2015

The native-language background of a listener has been shown to have an effect upon identifying speakers of a foreign language. Previous experimental research showed that a German target speaker was identified significantly better when listeners were native speakers of German, or native speakers of English who had some knowledge of German, than when they did not know the language of the target speaker (Schiller and Köster 1996). This result was taken as support for the hypothesis that familiarity with the language of the target speaker has a positive effect upon identifying that speaker. This paper reports the results of a follow-up experiment that investigated the identification of a speaker in a voice line-up using nonsense speech. The results show that German natives, monolingual English natives, and English natives with some knowledge of German do not significantly differ in identifying a German speaker when most of the linguistic information of the language of the target speaker is removed from the stimulus materials.
Different influences of the native language of a listener on speaker recognition
Authors: Köster Olaf , Schiller Niels O.
Published: March 2015

In forensic phonetics, lay or expert witnesses might be confronted with voice samples for auditory evaluation from a language they do not understand. In speaker identification experiments, it has been shown that knowledge of the target language affects recognition results. Köster et al. (1995) showed that German listeners and English listeners with a knowledge of German identified a German voice better than English listeners without knowledge of German. Replicating the same experiment with Spanish and Chinese listeners, the results of this study show that (a) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German obtain significantly better recognition results than their compatriots with no knowledge of the target language, and that (b) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German perform significantly worse than native Germans and English listeners with a knowledge of German. No clear evidence was found that the typological difference between the native language of the listener and the target language influenced recognition performance.
Speaker-specific information in voice quality parameters
Authors: Jessen Michael
Published: March 2015

Seven instances of the vowel /a/, embedded in a carrier sentence with a variety of prosodic and segmental conditions and each produced by twenty male German speakers were measured acoustically for a variety of supralaryngeal, laryngeal, and sublaryngeal types of voice quality, as well as for fundamental frequency. Measurements included parameters that reflect the variation of the voice source in the dimension between modal and breathy phonation, as well as the influence of subglottal pressure on the voice source. The voice source parameters were corrected for supralaryngeal influence according to a procedure proposed by Kenneth N. Stevens and students, arriving at parameters such as H1 * - H2*. Post hoc comparisons between speakers revealed that the parameters that carry most speaker-specific information are F3, F0, and H1 * - H2 •. The value and limits of the results for the forensic task of speaker identification are discussed.
The dictation and alteration of text
Authors: Olsson John
Published: March 2015

The author proposes that dictation should be considered as a language mode or form distinct from both spoken discourse and written text and provides linguistic measurements in support. Also proposed are several tests to demonstrate the distribution of certain lexical and functional items in language: it is shown that when text is altered, these distributions can change. The above concepts are applied to a well known dictated statement, that allegedly made by Derek Bentley to the police in 1952. It is demonstrated that the probability of this text having been produced by the dictation of a single person is low.
Investigation into the claim of weighted Cusum in authorship attribution studies
Authors: Canter David , Chester Joanne
Published: March 2015

Although there has been detailed criticism of the Cusum technique for authorship attribution the claims of its proponents are so attractive to the legal profession that any suggestion that the technique can be ‘improved’ requires careful consideration. One such suggestion is that the arbitrary nature of the judgements made of Cusum charts can be removed by ‘weighting’ the calculations of the Cusum values. To test the claims of weighted Cusums three texts from seven different authors were subjected to the weighted Cusum analysis; each of the three groups consisted of twenty-one samples. The results obtained in this experiment showed that only three out of sixty-three texts were identified as being written by more than one author. However, these three texts were derived from single-authored material. Further, none of the twenty-one multiple-authored texts produced significant results that would have led to the identification of more than one author. Therefore, the weighted Cusum technique did not reliably discriminate between texts of single and multiple authors.
KISSing the jury·- advantages and limitations of the ‘keep it simple’ principle in the presentation of expert evidence to courts and juries
Authors: Storey-White Kate
Published: March 2015

Initiatives by groups such as the ‘Plain English Movement’, which strive to render legal language comprehensible to the lay-person caught up in legal or judicial processes, might eventually include an appraisal of the problem of the language of expert evidence, which almost inevitably involves a trade-off between accessibility and scientific precision. The expert sitting quietly in the laboratory analysing forensic evidence, and then writing up a report, is often both physically and psychologically far removed from the court. Further, under the adversarial system ‘the court’ is not a single, simple entity, it involves a disparate array of participants: judge, jury, prosecutor, informant, defence counsel, opposing expert, pen writer or transcriber, defendant, and increasingly, interpreter. Each of these participants has the right to hear or view evidence in a form which ensures that it and its significance will be thoroughly understood. In this paper, I discuss the form and nature of forensic language both as a linguist and as an expert witness.
Linguistic ambiguity in non-statuary language: problems in ‘The search warrant in the matter of 7505 Derris Drive’
Authors: Dumas Bethany K. , Short Ann C.
Published: March 2015

When a motion to suppress was filed in a federal prosecution, this question arose: Did the search warrant authorize the FBI to seize the evidence sought to be suppressed? The warrant described certain items that could be seized, including both accounting documents and items such as notes and memoranda. A linguist testified about the current meanings of the non-accounting terms and the scope of the modifying clauses, ‘which will disclose the sale and receipt of automobiles, both rebuilt and salvage’ and ‘which will reveal the identities and location of co-conspirators’. This article summarizes the implications and context of those questions, presents the linguist's answers, and reports the judicial response.
Interpreting the transcript: problems in recording Aboriginal land claim proceedings in northern Australia
Authors: Walsh Michael
Published: March 2015

This paper considers the processes that go into the production of a transcript of legal proceedings and the consequences of inaccuracies in the transcript. The issues are illustrated by a land rights case involving Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia in which additional problems are encountered because of cultural distance and the mismatch between different forms of English. The problems range from relatively simple phonetic misunderstandings to the more difficult misapprehensions which arise because of the profoundly different cultural backgrounds of the participants. Examples from transcript show how the participants in the hearing can contribute to ‘transcriptional repair’. In this and other ways the participants are interpreting for the transcript.
Identifying regional and national orin of English-speaking Africans seeking asylum in German
Authors: Bobda Augustin Simo , Wolf Hans-Georg , Peter Lothar
Published: March 2015

Faced with the influx of asylum seekers without reliable identification, some European countries have started to resort to the analysis of spoken texts produced by the applicants to trace their true origins. This has triggered a hot debate among politicians, non-governmental organizations and academics. Ethical and scientific considerations are the two main poles of the debate. On the scientific front, the question is whether it is possible to determine the asylum seekers’ origin from the analysis of the spoken texts. The present paper, probably the first purely scientific contribution to the debate, has an affirmative answer with respect to asylum seekers from anglophone Africa. It argues that the identification of the region and even the country of origin of the subject, is possible, from phonetic/phonological, sociolinguistic, socio-cultural and other clues. The paper contends that, while one of the clues, especially the linguistic, may be sufficient, a combination of several provides a higher degree of reliability.
‘Let me put it simply&’: the case for a standard translation of the police caution and its explanation
Authors: Russell Sonia
Published: March 2015

The police caution, in interviews with suspects, is not an isolated linguistic event. Rather, it constitutes a move in a discourse sequence that begins with the tape buzzer and ends at the point when the officer proceeds to the facts of the case. This paper examines the sequence leading up to the caution and the events that follow, including the officer's explanation of the caution in ‘simple language’. Using tape-recorded data from twenty French interpreter-mediated interviews, it uses interpreters’ apparent difficulties as a lens through which to focus on the linguistic problems of the sequence. It also examines shifts between form-based and meaning-based interpreting, as the interpreter attempts to follow the officer's ‘simplification’. Finally, it is suggested that a standard translation of the caution should be supplied to all police stations, together with a standard explanation, both in English and foreign languages.
Forensic Semantics: the meaning of murder, manslaughter and homicide
Authors: Langford Ian
Published: March 2015

The purpose of this paper is to show how the meaning of an expression referring to a crime can be stated in simple words that anyone can understand. Judges need to explain to juries the meaning of the crime that the accused is charged with, the accused needs to understand it, interpreter and translator need to understand it, and of course, lawyers need to understand the charge when advising clients and when preparing for trial. This paper shows how the forensic linguist can help people involved in the criminal justice system to understand the meaning of expressions referring to crimes. This can be done by a method of analysis which represents meaning through about sixty basic English words and a simple syntax known to all speakers of English.