AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) PhD Studentship for "A Phonetic Investigation of Speaker Attribution and its Implications for Legal Contexts"

Applications are invited for an AHRC CDA doctoral studentship offered by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, to start in October 2025.

The studentship will be based in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. The successful applicant will work on a collaborative project co-led by Dr. Kirsty McDougall (kem37@cam.ac.uk), University of Cambridge and Dr Richard Rhodes, co-supervisor, and Forensic specialist in speech and audio at The Forensic Voice Centre.

Project Overview

In transcribing an evidential recording of an interaction involving two or more speakers, speaker attribution is the process of assigning each utterance in the transcript to a speaker. The police may believe that particular individuals were involved in the interaction, but recording quality is often poor, so exactly how many people were present and their identities can be unclear. Transcription of recordings is typically conducted in-house by police officers or other staff with no linguistic or phonetic training. However, attribution of speakers to utterances is not always straightforward, and transcribers do not achieve 100% accuracy even when recording conditions are good (see Love and Wright 2021). The risk of misattributing utterances is real and can lead to miscarriages of justice.

This project offers the opportunity to research the phonetic underpinnings of speaker attribution and its implications for legal contexts, including speaker attribution by police staff transcribers, expert transcribers and/or using automatic software. Candidates should propose a project that investigates one or more aspects of speaker attribution experimentally.

Further details of the project and its aims can be found on the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP website:

www.oocdtp.ac.uk/cam-cda-mcdougall-forensic-voice-centre

Funding:

The DTP studentships will provide an annual maintenance grant to cover living costs (£19,237 stipend + £600 CDA allowance pa at current rates) and university tuition fees at home fee level. The fee gap between the home and overseas fee rates will be covered by the University through internal co-funding for international candidates.

For more details, see: www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/funding.

Application process:

All applications will need to be made through the University Postgraduate Application Portal:

www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/mmalpdlng

Whilst making your online application please make clear that you are applying for the project 'A phonetic investigation of speaker attribution and its implications for legal contexts' and indicate the supervisor leading the project (Dr Kirsty McDougall). When applying for study through the Postgraduate Applicant Portal, you must indicate that you would like to be considered for funding, complete the AHRC section under "Funding" and upload the OOC DTP Application Form as an additional document when completing the application through the portal.

Informal enquiries about the project should be directed to the University supervisor (kem37@cam.ac.uk).

Application deadline is Tuesday 3^rd December 2024.

If you have any questions about this vacancy or the application process, please visit www.oocdtp.ac.uk/how-to-apply#tab-2276201

Please quote reference GA43228 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

We want to encourage the widest range of potential students to study for this studentship and are committed to welcoming students from different backgrounds to apply. We particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The University values diversity and is committed to equality of opportunity.

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