Abstract:

In forensic phonetics, lay or expert witnesses might be confronted with voice samples for auditory evaluation from a language they do not understand. In speaker identification experiments, it has been shown that knowledge of the target language affects recognition results. Köster et al. (1995) showed that German listeners and English listeners with a knowledge of German identified a German voice better than English listeners without knowledge of German. Replicating the same experiment with Spanish and Chinese listeners, the results of this study show that (a) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German obtain significantly better recognition results than their compatriots with no knowledge of the target language, and that (b) Spanish and Chinese listeners with knowledge of German perform significantly worse than native Germans and English listeners with a knowledge of German. No clear evidence was found that the typological difference between the native language of the listener and the target language influenced recognition performance.

Author: Olaf Köster, Niels O. Schiller