Abstract:

Voice disguise can potentially occur in every recording that is associated with an offence. One possible manner is the use of voice disguise by adopting a foreign accent. The aim of the presented study was to examine how well native German speakers could produce a foreign accent (French) and in particular to describe the accent’s main features. A further aim was to observe how consistently these features could be maintained over a long period of time. The results of auditory, acoustic and linguistic (non-phonetic) analyses were that speakers are able to use several forms of variations during voice disguise by using a foreign accent. The variations were mostly articulatory, but half of the speakers varied pitch as well. There was less variation in non-phonetic features as had been expected. The varied features partially matched with those which would be expected from French natives speaking German, but speakers were generally unable to perform consistently.

Author: Sara Neuhauser