15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Imitation, Expectation and Acceptance: The Role of Age and First Language in a Nordic Setting

Elisabeth Zetterholm (1), Kirk P. H. Sullivan (2), James Green (3), Erik Eriksson (2), Peter E. Czigler (4)

(1) Lund University, Sweden
(2) Umeå University, Sweden
(3) University of Otago, New Zealand
(4) Örebro University, Sweden

High quality speaker imitation can lead to miscarriages of justice. It has been shown that imitation can lead to speaker misidentification; this is a problem in a legal setting. Recent research has indicated that listener expectation relating to the topic of an imitated passage has a strong impact upon the acceptance or rejection of the imitation. The results showed that the teenagers who were less familiar than the adult Swedish voices with the target voice were less affected by the topic of the imitation than the Swedish adults and that the further the listeners came from the target voice's dialectal area had a minimal effect upon the results. It was also found that although, the non- Swedish Nordic listeners were not as affected by the semantic content of the training passage as the Swedish listeners, a similar trend was still found.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zetterholm, Elisabeth / Sullivan, Kirk P. H. / Green, James / Eriksson, Erik / Czigler, Peter E. (2003): "Imitation, expectation and acceptance: the role of age and first language in a Nordic setting", In ICPhS-15, 683-686.