LLS Colloquium: "What’s in a voice? Laymen estimations of age, weight, height, education, and geographical origin"

Event details

On Wednesday 5 May 2021, Adrian Leemann (University of Bern) will be presenting on "What’s in a voice? Laymen estimations of age, weight, height, education, and geographical origin", which is joint work alongside Hannah Hedegard, Carina Steiner, Péter Jeszenszky and Dave Britain.

What’s in a voice? Laymen estimations of age, weight, height, education, and geographical origin

Perceptual Dialectology, Forensic Speech Science, and other Applied Linguistic fields such as Automatic Speaker Recognition, have long been engaged in understanding whether laymen can accurately identify demographic and physiological characteristics from speech. To date, studies in these areas have yielded mixed findings. In this talk, we present the initial results from a recent large-scale digital survey assessing how accurate Swiss people are when estimating the age, region, education level, weight, height, and political and sexual orientation of Swiss German speakers using relatively short (~30-45s) audio clips from the Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space (SDATS) corpus (www.sdats.ch). We will demonstrate that some parameters fare better than others, as well as the extent to which the study’s implications and correlations between characteristics can be applied to language contexts beyond Switzerland.

The talk will take place at 4pm on Zoom, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end - you can join using this link. 

Event poster:  What’s in a voice? Laymen estimations of age, weight, height, education, and geographical origin