Speaker identification in a second language by university-level language students

In forensic phonetics a witness may be required to identify a speaker based on voice samples from a language which is not their first language. Previous experimental work has shown that knowledge of a language has an effect on an individual’s ability to identify speakers. However, it has recently been demonstrated that this positive effect on speaker identification due to familiarity with the language disappears when most of the linguistic information of the language of the target speaker is removed from the stimulus materials. This paper examines whether the ability to identify a speaker in a second language increases over the course of the British four-year language degree.