In-between speech: the speaker-specificity of non-speech vocalisations

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During a crime, victims or witnesses may hear a perpetrator's voice without seeing their face andare later asked to identify them from a voice identification line-up. Elsewhere, an analyst compares an incriminating recording of a perpetrator with a sample of a suspect's speech. The field of forensic speech science is concerned with how to identify a person from their voice, but sometimesthe two samples being compared are mismatched. In the situation of a crime, there may not be much actual speech - instead, there may be only screams, groans, or laughter, known as non-speech vocalisations (NSVs). In the compared sample or voice line-up, however, there is typically only speech, and NSVs are discarded. What is currently unknown is whether speakers can accurately be identified from NSVs. This project will investigate this question by asking howaccurately listeners identify speakers from different NSV types, and how speaker-specific acoustic features vary in different NSV types. It will also explore whether speakers who are easily recognised by their NSVs are also equally easily recognised by their speech. This will benefit the field by improving our understanding of how speakers can be identified by NSVs.