APPLICATION OF PHONETIC KNOWLEDGE FOR FORENSIC PURPOSES
Keywords:
phonetic, forensic, forensic profiling, SerbianAbstract
This paper presents the latest knowledge about phonetics as an applied discipline that has found its place in forensics in the last few decades - when solving court cases, criminal offenses and establishing authorship. The application of phonetics in forensic voice analysis is related to 1967 and the city of Michigan, where forensic phonetics was formed as a discipline that has been in the spotlights for the past few decades and is developing with high intensity. Two basic tasks that are carried out in forensic speech analysis and practice are forensic profiling and speaker or voice comparison. As opposed to a layman's / non-expert recognition of speakers with hearing aids, expert and professional forensic recognition implies a hearing estimate and a comparison of the similarities and differences of all suspect voices. The first task is necessarily related to phonetics, i.e. sociophonetics – a branch that studies phonetic traits in a language conditioned by regional or social stratification, resulting in the formation of dialects and sociolects. The main goal of forensic profiling is reflected in building the suspect's profile: providing all the necessary information in order to build the profile and to successfully identify and detect the suspect. This necessarily implies that we must successfully identify the gender, age and dialectical origin of the subjects, and narrow down the area and the number of places where the suspect will be pursued. This is not an easy task because many social and phonetic features can be masked and concealed successfully. In order for the voice expertise to be successfully performed, the phonetician must perform several tasks: he must phonetically transcribe the speaker’s voice recording to determine the regional variation, dialect or idiolect; he must carry out the acoustic analysis of the recording (primarily vowels, but also consonants). The phonetic analysis can be performed on a segmental level, when we analyze the pronunciation of vowels and consonants (in Serbian, interesting forensic markers can be affricates /dž/, /č/, /đ/, /ć/, the (in)correct pronunciation of the vibrant consonants /r/, /l/, /v/), as well as on a suprasegmental level, which implies the prosodic analysis of the recording – the number of prosodemes and their place in words, the existence of post-accentual and pre-accentual lengths, which is conditioned by the dialectical origin of the subjects. The acoustic analysis involves processing the material in a software package (PRAAT, version 6.0.14, BOERSMA & WEENICK 2016) and measuring the following parameters: duration, tone movement (f0), intensity and the first three formant frequencies. All these parameters vary in dialects, and the task of phonetics is to study, describe and present a clear picture of forensic regional markers. The presented tasks point to the immensity of knowledge and skills that a phonetician must possess to successfully generate the suspect’s profile and future research should be focused on the use of the so-called mixed/hybrid methods.
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