Huge congratulations to Lois Fairclough, who passed her PhD viva subject to minor revisions earlier this week!

Lois (back centre) surrounded by members of the Phonetics Lab (back), together with viva chair Silke Brandt (front left), external examiner Kirsty McDougall (front centre) and internal examiner Justin Lo (front right). Celebrating Lois’ viva success!

Lois’ thesis, titled Evaluting sources of variability in formant-based speaker discrimination, was examined by Kirsty McDougall (Cambridge) and Justin Lo (Lancaster).

The thesis investigates how measurement procedures, analyst decision-making, and the acoustic properties of speech affect the measurement of formant frequencies in spontaneous, non-contemporaneous speech and speaker discrimination performance. Through a series of experiments, her thesis shows structured variability in formant-based speaker discrimination that is dependent on measurement reliability and parameterisation choices. These findings will contribute to the interpreation of use of acoustic-phonetic evidence in forensic phonetic casework.