Research Seminar: Helen Fraser

The Speaker

Professor Helen Fraser is Director of the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence in the School of Languages and Linguistics. With a background in phonetics and speech perception, she has long-standing interests in the representation of spoken language, both internally in the minds of speakers and listeners, and externally in transcripts and in everyday and technical metalanguage.

See here for more information.

Abstract

Deciphering indistinct forensic speech recordings: Practical challenges with theoretical implications

Many criminal trials feature recorded speech as forensic evidence. The audio quality is often very poor, to the extent the court needs a transcript to understand the content. Current law allows transcripts to be provided by police. This can create injustice, and Australian linguists are advocating for reform to ensure forensic audio is always and only accompanied by a demonstrably reliable transcript. Among other issues, this creates a new research question: how to provide demonstrably reliable transcripts of indistinct audio with unknown content and potentially misleading context. Pursuing this question brings practical difficulties, but also theoretical challenges for our understanding of everyday speech perception, which itself often involves understanding indistinct audio of unknown content and potentially misleading context. This presentation discusses those challenges, taking a Bayesian perspective of human cognition.

The Seminar

In this event in a series, speakers from within the Hub, the University, and the broader research community tell us about their research. Our Research Seminar Series involves speakers covering a broad range of themes surrounding our Hub’s interests, so we’ll hopefully all learn something interesting. Whether you want to learn to inform your own research or to simply satisfy a personal curiosity, we hope to see you there.

Watch the Replay

Watch the recording of this seminar on the CHDH Youtube Channel