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LLS research on Phonetics and Phonology presented at IAFPA and ICPhS

Posted on 28 September 2023

York staff, students and associates have had a busy Summer of research. They have made significant paper and poster contributions during two key conferences in the areas of Phonetics, Phonology, and Prosody: IAFPA and ICPhS.

York staff, students and associates have had a busy Summer of research. They have made significant paper and poster contributions during two key conferences in the areas of Phonetics, Phonology, and Prosody: IAFPA and ICPhS. The contributions reveal the breadth of expertise in the department across the many dimensions within these areas of study.

The International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) held its 31st conference in Zurich on July 9-12. York made an impressive number of contributions, including:

  • Vincent Hughes, Carmen Llamas and Thomas Kettig. The effect of other forensic evidence and expert opinions on lay listener perceptions in voice comparison tasks
  • Workshop 3: Philip Harrison and Amelia Gully. Breaking the chain: exploring the limits of interpreting audio evidence
  • Lauren Harrington and Richard Rhodes. Forensic transcription: a survey of expert transcription practices in Europe and North America
  • Helen Fraser, Debbie Loakes, Ute Knoch and Lauren Harrington. Towards accountable evidence-based methods for producing reliable transcripts of indistinct forensic audio
  • Vincent Hughes, Jessica Wormald, Paul Foulkes, Philip Harrison, Poppy Welch, Chenzi Xu, Finnian Kelly and David van der Vloed. Effects of vocal variation on the output of an automatic speaker recognition system
  • Chenzi Xu, Vincent Hughes, Jessica Wormald, Paul Foulkes, Philip Harrison, Poppy Welch, Finnian Kelly and David van der Vloed. Impact of the changes in long-term acoustic features upon different-speaker ASR scores
  • Isolde Wagner, Dagmar Boss and Vincent Hughes. Best Practice Manual for the Methodology of Forensic Speaker Comparison - A Framework Document developed within ENFSI

And the posters:

  • Ben Gibb-Reid. It’s all like yeah: Assessing the speaker discriminant potential of yeah
  • Chloe Patman, Paul Foulkes and Vincent Hughes. Smile with your eyes! The impact of face coverings on speech comprehension and
    perceptions of speaker attributes
  • James Tompkinson* and Kate Haworth. The perception and interpretation of additional information in legally relevant transcripts
  • Philip Harrison, Paul Foulkes, Vincent Hughes, Poppy Welch, Jessica Wormald and Chenzi Xu. Interactive Visualisation of Speech Data in Virtual Reality
  • Linda Gerlach, Luke Carroll, Lois Fairclough, Ben Gibb-Reid, Lauren Harrington, Daniel Denian Lee, Alexandra Lieb, Sophie Möller, Chloe Patman, Alice Paver, Sascha Schäfer, Marlon Siewert, Nikita Suthar, M. Gabriela Valenzuela Farías, Samantha Williams, Georgina Brown and Christin Kirchhübel. Learning by doing: An example of casework-relevant training in forensic speech science
  • Alanna Tibbs. Exposure to a greater range of emotions and speech qualities make an ear witness more reliable at identifying a voice?

Similarly, a large group of York staff and researchers from LL&S and Psychology made over twenty contributions to the quadrennial International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS) in Prague on August 7-11. The conference had 1,300 participants and around 600 papers were presented. All papers are now freely available at the ICPhS conference proceedings, and those by York include, among others:

  • Hellmuth Sam, Almbark Rana, Lucas Chris, Brown Georgina: Vowel raising across Syria and Jordan in the DiVaL Corpus
  • Cantarutti Marina: The devil is in the detail: An interactional-phonetic study of G-word interjections and some methodological implications
  • Xu Chenzi, Foulkes Paul, Harrison Philip, Hughes Vincent, Wormald Jess: Contributions of acoustic measures to the classification of laryngeal voice quality in continuous English speech
  • Gibb-Reid Ben: Just one word: an analysis of just as a speaker discriminant using various acoustic measures
  • Harrington Lauren, Hughes Vincent: Automatic speech recognition: system variability within a sociolinguistically homogenous group of speakers
  • Hou Xinzi, Zhao Liang, Chodroff Eleanor: Intermingling tone systems: the relationship of Nanning Mandarin to Nanning Cantonese and Standard Mandarin 
  • Wormald Jessica, Foulkes Paul, Harrison Philip, Hughes Vincent, Kelly Finnian, van der Vloed David, Welch Poppy, Xu Chenzi: Sensitivity of x-vectors and automatic speaker recognition scores to vocal variation
  • Eijk Lotte, Stankova Stefany, Meekings Sophie: Exploring global and local articulation rate entrainment in typical and atypical speakers