The Speaker Identification Ability of Blind and Sighted Listeners ― An Empirical Investigation

Almut Braun carried out forensic phonetic speaker identification experiments (voice lineups) with 306 lay listeners. Blind listeners significantly outperformed sighted listeners when the speech recordings were presented in studio quality. For recordings in mobile phone quality or of whispering voices, blind and sighted listeners achieved similar results. The data can be used as reference material for real cases with blind earwitnesses. Furthermore, it is discussed whether blind individuals are particularly suitable to work as forensic audio analysts for law enforcement agencies.

Almut Braun was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Phonetics at Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Germany. She works currently as a Research Associate in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, UK.