Research grants

Research grants

IAFPA offers research grants annually to teams lead by Full IAFPA members. These are small grants intended to kick-start larger projects which are relevant to the aims of IAFPA.

Research Grant Applications:

The IAFPA Research Committee award small research grants (max. 1,500 GBP) in all areas of forensic phonetics and acoustics.

Eligibility: To be eligible for a grant, at least one of the applicants must be an IAFPA member. Applications by non-members are subject to a successful IAFPA membership application by at least one of the applicants prior to the start of the funding period. In the case of an unsuccessful IAFPA membership application, the grant award will be withdrawn.

Applications are open at specific times through each year. To apply for a research grant, please contact the Research Committee chair, Finnian Kelly: finnian@oxfordwaveresearch.com

Previous projects

The following projects were funded by IAFPA:

• Identifying correlations between speech parameters for forensic speaker comparisons
  Investigators: Erica Gold and Vincent Hughes (Department of Language and Linguistic Science, The University of York)
• The identification of British English accents using prosodic features
  Investigators: Carmen Llamas and Sam Hellmuth (Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, UK)
• The ‘double filtering’ effect – a pilot study on GSM plus air-transmitted recordings using Automatic Voice Comparison
  Investigators: Joel Åkesson and Jonas Lindh (Voxalys AB and Division of Speech and Language Pathology Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg)
• Speaker Recognition Ability of Blind and Sighted Listeners:
  An Empirical Investigation Almut Braun and Prof. Dr. Hermann J. Künzel, Department of Phonetics, University of Marburg.
• The speaker-specificity of fluency disruptions:
  Martin Duckworth (Duckworth Consultancy, Forensic Speech Analysis, South Brent, Devon, UK) and Dr. Kirsty McDougall (Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge).
• The vowels of Eastern and Western Mandenkan:
  Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sylvia Moosmüller (Acoustic Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) and Dr. Erwin Ebermann (Department of African Studies, University of Vienna).
• Reference corpus of Dutch drug users I: MDMA/Ecstasy
  Dr. Maartje Schreuder¹, Viktoria Papp², Prof. dr. Jan Ramaekers³ and Dr. Eef Theunissen^{3
  1}Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, ²Linguistics Department, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, ³Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
• Forensic comparison of Spanish twins and non-twin brothers’ voices
  Eugenia San Segundo Fernández¹ and Prof. Dr. Hermann J. Künzel
  ¹Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Laboratorio de Fonética, Madrid, ²Department of Phonetics, University of Marburg
• Formant analysis using different techniques
  David M Howard, University of York, UK
• The evaluation of vocal roughness by different listener groups
  Angelika Braun, University of Marburg, Fachbereich Phonetik
• Can a voice impersonator challenge a speaker verification system?
  Elisabeth Zetterholm, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University
• Forensic comparison of Chinese female voices
  Cuiling Zhang¹ and Geoffrey Stewart Morrison^{2
  1}Department of Criminal Science and Technology, Shenyang, China, ²School of Language Studies, Canberra, Australia
• The reliability of formant measurements in high quality audio data: The effect of agreeing measurement procedures
  Martin Duckworth¹, Kirsty McDougall², Gea de Jong² and Linda Shockey^{3
  1}The College of St Mark & St John, Plymouth, UK, ²Phonetic Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK, ³Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Reading, UK.
• The Long Term Cumulative Formant Distribution in Forensic Voice Analysis
  Catalin Grigoras, National Institute of Forensic Expertise, Bucharest, Romania
• Influence of loudness variations on forensic fundamental frequency statistics
  Michael Jessen, Bundeskriminalamt Wiesbaden, Department of Speaker Identification and Tape Analysis
• Laboratory reference data on long-term formant distributions
  Michael Jessen, Bundeskriminalamt Wiesbaden, Department of Speaker Identification and Audio Analysis
• Fundamental Frequency in the Viennese Dialect and Standard Austrian German under different conditions
  Sylvia Moosmüller, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Acoustics Research Institute
• Compilation of a phonological database of contemporary Scottish English
  Dominic Watt, Centre for Linguistic Research, University of Aberdeen