IAFPA research grant for Willemijn Heeren and Lei He
Willemijn Heeren has, together with dr. Lei He (Department of Linguistics, Tübingen & Center for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, Zürich), received a research grant from the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics to start a pilot project on “Between-speaker variability in dynamic formant characteristics in spontaneous speech”.
This project aims to investigate the forensic relevance of the dynamic formant measures of He et al. (2019), where speeds of first-formant (F1) increases and decreases were measured. F1 decreases were found to explain more between-speaker variability than F1 decreases in Zürich German read sentences. The project will assess the forensic relevance of this measure using spontaneous speech in four languages.