Meike M de Boer, Willemijn F L Heeren
With forensic recordings being collected in multiple languages increasingly often, this study investigates the language dependency of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in speakers of native (L1) Dutch and non-native (L2) English. Due to phonetic similarity between the languages, Dutch learners of English may exhibit language-independent /s/ acoustics, making it an interesting feature for multilingual forensic speaker comparisons (FSCs). However, the findings show that out of the four spectral moments, center of gravity, standard deviation ( SD ), skewness, and kurtosis, only SD remained stable across the languages; the other measurements were language-dependent...
April 20, 2024: Language and Speech