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The use and utility of localised speech forms in determining identity: forensic and sociophonetic perspectives

本地化语音形式在确定身份中的使用和效用：法医和社会语音学的观点

基本信息

批准号：
ES/M010783/1
负责人：
Carmen Llamas
金额：
$ 85.8万
依托单位：
University of York
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2016
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2016 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FM010783%2F1
关键词：
use utility localised speech forms

项目摘要

The project aims to investigate variation in accents of English across Northeast England. We focus on the speech of working-class people from Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. It is well established that these accents differ significantly from one another, but it is less clear what particular pronunciations lead listeners to group the varieties as one accent (typically, 'Geordie'). The project seeks to identify specific features that cause the accents to be classed together, such that they are heard to be distinct from other accents of northern Britain. Simultaneously, we will ascertain what sounds listeners use to classify speakers into subgroups, e.g. from Newcastle versus Sunderland. The role of socio-economic class is of key importance here. The localised patterns that allow listeners to assign speakers to one group or another are, according to the literature, traditionally associated with speakers from lower socio-economic groups, i.e. the 'working class'. However, in this project we ask whether clear differences exist between the speech of working-class speakers who routinely travel for work or leisure and that of economically marginal individuals we might label 'never worked/long-term unemployed'. Plentiful sociological research on this social divide exists, but how it impacts on people's speech has not yet been investigated systematically. We will also take gender and age differences into account, and assess the data for signs of sound change. It has been shown that greater mobility promotes linguistic uniformity through convergence of speech habits, while limited mobility has the opposite effect. We therefore predict that more mobile members of our sample would converge linguistically over time and across the three localities, while the economically marginal groups in each place would become more divergent.The project's second strand concerns speech variation at the level of the individual rather than the group or community. This is particularly relevant in the forensic domain, wherein individual identity is crucial. In criminal investigations, forensic speech analysts perform two main tasks. The first, speaker profiling, involves attempting to specify the geographical and social origins of an unknown speaker from a recorded sample of his/her speech, so as to assist the police in identifying potential suspects. The task requires detailed, up-to-date information about the speech of the community/ies to which the unknown speaker may belong. Given its focus on the identification of highly localised speech forms, the corpus produced by the proposed project will satisfy those requirements. The second forensic task is speaker comparison. Here, the expert compares two speech samples, and assesses the likelihood that they were produced by the same or different speakers. Increasingly, this is done in an automated way, using software that extracts information about the acoustic properties of the recordings. The level of similarity between the two samples is evaluated in the context of a relevant 'background population' of recordings of speakers with the same or similar accents. This yields a measure of the samples' typicality. The problem with this approach is that ideally one ought to collect a new corpus for every case, which is likely to be prohibitively expensive. It would be advantageous, therefore, if acoustic parameters in the speech signal which are relatively insensitive to accent variation could be identified. The proposed project tests whether this is possible by combining the Northeast recordings with those from an existing corpus of a markedly different accent (Standard Southern British English). If the approach proves legitimate, its practical value to the forensic speech analysis community would be considerable.Findings emerging from this two-stranded project will therefore benefit the relevant academic communities as well as having significant applied utility in the field of forensic speech science.

该项目旨在调查英格兰东北部英语口音的变化。我们关注来自纽卡斯尔、桑德兰和米德尔斯堡的工人阶级的演讲。这些口音彼此之间有很大的不同，但不太清楚是什么特殊的发音导致听众将这些口音归类为一种口音（通常是“乔迪”）。该项目旨在确定导致这些口音被归类在一起的具体特征，以便它们与北方英国的其他口音区别开来。同时，我们将确定听众使用什么声音来将说话者分类为子组，例如来自纽卡斯尔与桑德兰。社会经济阶层的作用在这里至关重要。根据文献，允许听众将扬声器分配到一个或另一个组的本地化模式传统上与来自较低社会经济群体的扬声器相关联，即“工人阶级”。然而，在这个项目中，我们问是否存在明显的差异，工人阶级的发言人谁经常旅行的工作或休闲和经济边缘的个人，我们可能会标记为“从未工作/长期失业”之间的讲话。关于这种社会分化的社会学研究很多，但它对人们言语的影响还没有得到系统的研究。我们还将考虑性别和年龄差异，并评估声音变化的迹象。研究表明，较大的流动性通过语言习惯的趋同促进语言的一致性，而有限的流动性则产生相反的效果。因此，我们预测，随着时间的推移，我们的样本中更多的移动的成员将在语言上趋同，并跨越三个地方，而每个地方的经济边缘群体将变得更加分散。这一点在法医领域尤其重要，因为在法医领域，个人身份至关重要。在刑事调查中，法医语音分析师执行两项主要任务。第一种是说话人特征分析，即试图从一个不知名的说话人的讲话录音样本中确定他/她的地理和社会出身，以协助警方确定潜在的嫌疑人。该任务需要关于未知说话者可能属于的社区的语音的详细的最新信息。鉴于其重点是识别高度本地化的语音形式，拟议项目产生的语料库将满足这些要求。第二个取证任务是说话人比较。在这里，专家比较两个语音样本，并评估它们是由相同或不同的说话者产生的可能性。越来越多地，这是以自动化的方式完成的，使用软件提取有关录音声学特性的信息。在具有相同或相似口音的说话者的录音的相关“背景群体”的上下文中评估两个样本之间的相似性水平。这产生了样本典型性的度量。这种方法的问题是，理想情况下，应该为每个案例收集一个新的语料库，这可能是非常昂贵的。因此，如果能够识别语音信号中对口音变化相对不敏感的声学参数，则将是有利的。拟议的项目测试这是否是可能的，结合东北录音与现有语料库的明显不同的口音（标准的英国南部英语）。如果这种方法被证明是合理的，它的实用价值将是相当大的法医语音分析社区。因此，从这个双链项目中出现的结果将有利于相关的学术界，以及在法医语音科学领域具有重要的应用效用。