Shifting the Burden: towards more equitable tests for Language Analysis in the Asylum Procedure

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Language Analysis in the Asylum Procedure (LAAP) is used by a number of governments, particularly in Europe. Its purpose is to produce a linguistic assessment of claims to origin by asylum applicants who cannot or will not prove their identity by documentary means. LAAP is highly controversial in both academia and the media, yet remarkably little directly relevant experimental work (in)validating its practice has so far been conducted. LAAP depends on applicants' language production (i.e. their speech); in fact, the question in LAAP is, 'To what extent is the applicant's speech identifiable with the area from which they claim to have originated?'. At present, applicants must demonstrate the authenticity of their speech in a one-shot interview, and the assessment of the derived data is carried out by analysts who are native speaker non-linguists (NSNLs) working for LAAP agencies. Yet speech patterns may vary due to past mobility, socio-demographic factors and performance on the day, leaving LAAP assessments open to criticism.This being the case, the core of my research is empirical in nature. It centres not on the speech but on the language perception of applicants-in particular, their ability to identify fellow speakers of their own dialect. Perception is an important aspect of applicants' linguistic competence that has hitherto been overlooked in LAAP. The ultimate objective of my work is the development of novel, robust and evidence-based perception tests that can confirm-or cast doubt on-the primary, speech-based LAAP assessment. These perception tests would complement current LAAP practice by eliciting judgements from applicants themselves, not an NSNL analyst, in identifying authentic samples of their own (claimed) language variety. The PDF will allow me to disseminate to academic audiences the results of experiments piloting these novel tests, and to put the case for their use to LAAP agencies.My experiments mainly concern Syrian Arabic. Quantitative data analysis in my PhD demonstrates significantly superior accuracy for Syrian over non-Syrian NSNLs when identifying utterances in Syrian Arabic. This finding, which is consistent with my initial hypothesis, engenders optimism about a novel perception test involving the same task, since there is no reason to believe that genuine Syrian NSNL asylum applicants would perform significantly worse than the Syrian NSNL listeners in my PhD experiments. This perception test would be founded on the empirically validated performance of the target test groups-(Syrian) Arabic-speaking NSNLs vs. (non-Syrian) Arabic-speaking NSNLs-in my thesis and in further experimental work, conducted during the PDF. The PDF will also allow me to build on analysis of qualitative data in my PhD to develop a second type of perception test. I will examine the cues that listeners cited in identifying their own or other language varieties, and create a series of audio texts in which features are acoustically adjusted or placed in contexts where they do not occur in Syrian Arabic. For example, /e/ could be artificially 'elongated' by the use of computer software, and /q/ placed in words where it does not belong. In the second test, asylum applicants will listen to these texts and be asked to identify the anomalies. My hypothesis is that an authentic Syrian applicant will perceive the extra-long /e/ and the /q/ as not naturally occurring in the speech of a fellow Syrian, while an applicant pretending to be Syrian will lack the linguistic perceptions necessary to recognise the anomalies. Uptake by agencies of these tests would add several layers of validation to extant LAAP practice, thereby enhancing its fairness, rigour and transparency. I will dedicate time within the PDF to engage with LAAP agencies and the media to raise awareness about issues of fairness in LAAP. I will also explore collaborations through which the tests could be adapted for speakers of other dialects and languages.