Speaker specificity of hesitation markers in bilingual New Zealand English &amp; te reo Māori speakers (Wong &amp; Papp, 2017)
Creators: name: Wong, Sidney
name: Papp, Viktoria
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2023
Subjects: classificationCode: 470411
subject: Sociolinguistics

description: The current study uses 21 bilingual speakers of New Zealand English and te reo Māori from the Māori and New Zealand English (MAONZE) [1] Corpus in order to investigate hesitation markers as a speaker-specific variable for forensic voice comparison. The hesitation markers of interest in this study are non-lexical hesitation markers <i>ah</i> and <i>um</i> which occur frequently in the parallel corpora. This study builds upon the current findings of hesitation markers as a speaker-specific variable [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] within a cross-language context. Foulkes et al., [3] investigated the speaker-specificity of hesitation markers by applying a linear discriminant function (LDA). Foulkes et al. [3] found that non-lexical hesitation markers, showed the least within-speaker variability and were more reliable than lexical words in speaker discrimination. In the current study, acoustic values such as duration, formant values, and f0 were extracted through LaBB-CAT [7] and analysed using LDA with a jacknifed prediction, and variance in the dataset were analysed using Welche’s two sample <i>t</i>-tests and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Based on the findings of the current study, non-lexical hesitation markers such as <i>uh</i> and <i>um</i> showed speaker-specificity in their acoustic realisation. The acoustic realisation of the formant frequency measurements held constant across language conditions, followed by pitch information which did not show significant variation within-speakers. However, there is variability among the prediction accuracy of the models. Numeric variables such as the first three formant measurements (F1, F2, and F3) and pitch data (minimum, mean, and maximum) were the most reliable factors for speaker discrimination and in turn the most speaker-specific. There are distributional differences between the usage of non-lexical hesitation markers in English and te reo Māori. The results from this study indicates that acoustic values of non-lexical hesitation markers remain constant over language condition.<b>References</b>[1] King, J., Maclagan, M., Harlow, R., Keegan, P., &amp; Watson, C. (2010). The MAONZE Corpus: Establishing a Corpus of Maori Speech. <i>New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics</i>, 16(2), 1.[2] Braun, A., &amp; Rosin, A. (2015). On the Speaker-Specificity of Hesitation. In 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.[3] Foulkes, P., Carrol, G., and Hughes, S. (2004). Sociolinguistics and acoustic variability in filled pauses. In International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics. Helsinki, Finland.[4] Hughes, V., Foulkes, P., &amp; Wood, S. (2016). Formant dynamics and durations of um improve the performance of automatic speaker recognition systems. In 16th Australasian Conference on Speech Science and Technology (ASSTA). University of Western Sydney, Australia: York.[5] Hughes, V., Wood, S., &amp; Foulkes, P. (2016). Strength of forensic voice comparison evidence from the acoustics of filled pauses. <i>International Journal of Speech Language and the Law</i>, 23(1), 99–132. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v23i1.29874[6] Wood, S., Hughes, V., &amp; Foulkes, P. (2014). Filled pauses as variables in speaker comparison: dynamic formant analysis and duration measurements improve performance for ‘um’. In 23rd Annual Conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA), Zurich, Switzerland.[7] Fromont, R., &amp; Hay, J. (2017). Language, Brain &amp; Behaviour Corpus Analysis Tool. English, Christchurch, New Zealand: New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. Retrieved from https://labbcat.canterbury.ac.nz/system/