Profile

Biography

Natalie Fecher is a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher/PhD Student funded by the International FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network 'Bayesian Biometrics For Forensics' (BBfor2).

Besides working on her PhD topic on multimodal speech and speaker recognition, she is involved in the Schwa project within the Forensic speech science research group.

As a (post)graduate she moreover gained research experience in both academic and industrial institutions in Germany (amongst others the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, the Centre for General Linguistics Berlin and the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories Berlin).

Career

Research

Overview

• audio-visual speech perception
• acoustic phonetics
• lay ear-/eyewitnesses
• lip-/speechreading

PhD thesis: 'Multimodal speech and speaker recognition: forensic implications of audio-visual integration in speech intelligibility and speaker identification.' (supervised by Dominic Watt)

Current projects

• Marie Curie FP7 Network BBfor2
• Schwa project

Research group(s)

• Forensic speech science

Publications

Selected publications

• Fuchs, S., Weirich, M., Kroos, C., Fecher, N., Pape, D. & Koppetsch, S. (2010): Time for a shave? Does facial hair interefere with visual speech intelligibility? In Fuchs, S., Hoole, P., Mooshammer, C. & Zygis, M. (eds.), Between the regular and the particular in speech and language, 247-264. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.
• Fuchs, S., Weirich, M., Kroos, C., Fecher, N., Pape, D. & Koppetsch, S. (2010): Time for a shave? Does facial hair interefere with visual speech intelligibility? Annals of Improbable Research 16(1): 6-8.
• Fecher, N., Watt, D. (2011): Speaking under cover: The effect of face-concealing garments on spectral properties of fricatives. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, August 17-21, 2011, Hong Kong, China (accepted).
• Fecher, N. (2011): Spectral properties of fricatives: a forensic approach. Proceedings of the 4th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics, May 25-27, 2011, Paris, France, p. 71-74

External activities

Memberships

• International Speech Communication Association
  
• International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics

Invited talks and conferences

• Speaking under cover: The impact of face-concealing garments on the acoustics of fricatives. Talk at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, July 24-27, 2011, Vienna, Austria.