Alice Paver

I’m a first-year PhD student at Jesus College, Cambridge, supervised by Dr Kirsty McDougall. I was awarded the studentship ‘In-between speech’, a Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with the National Crime Agency, focusing on the role of speech disfluencies and non-speech vocalisations in characterising speakers for forensic purposes.

I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and then completed my MSc in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York, after which I worked for three and a half years on a large, cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research project in the field of forensic linguistics called Improving Voice Identification Procedures (IVIP). This job prepared me for academic research in the field of forensic speech science, as I designed, conducted, analysed and wrote up experiments looking at voice parade parameters, speaker similarity and distinctiveness, and behavioural stereotypes about voices. I’m looking forward to furthering my interest in the relationship between forensic speaker identification (by both lay-listeners and experts), and speaker distinctiveness.