Assessing acoustic features in the speech of asylum seekers

Abstract

One of the areas of forensic linguistics concerns asylum seekers who speak languages which are foreign to the official language of the country where they apply for asylum. Identifying and verifying their real national background may be difficult if their speech manner reveals non-typical properties of their (real or alleged) native languages. Governments submit speech samples of such asylum seekers for linguistic analysis on various levels, including phonetic acoustics. This aspect of forensic linguistics raises questions about the scientific merit of such an analysis. Our aim is to examine some of the questions which relate to segmental and supra-segmental features that are analyzed acoustically based on recorded samples of (alleged) native languages of asylum seekers and compared with the same features as known from the literature. We demonstrate such issues by examples from the speech of Arabic-speaking asylum seekers whose native tongue is (supposed to be) some local dialect but the recording includes foreign features reflecting different dialects or languages. These questions involve sociolinguistic factors that affect speech production of individual speakers due to their complicated and unstable life. We suggest that the acoustic methods currently used for dialect verification could be considered pseudo-science in many cases. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.