Researcher Summary
My research interests are fourfold. In my dissertation work I investigated how physiology and performance separately feed into the production of speaker gender. To tease these two apart I documented the speech of both transitioning and transitioned female-to-male transgender/transsexual speakers. Also related to physiological issues, one of my forensic speech science research topics centers around mining large databases to estimate speaker biometric information, primarily speaker height, from the acoustic signal.
In my other research project of forensic relevance, I am in the process of building a corpus of speakers under the influence of intoxicants that will hopefully serve as a reference corpus in forensic casework and yield insight into the effects of intoxicants on speech. Currently the database contains heroin speech I collected and analyzed for my MSc at the University of York, and I and my colleagues at the Maastricht Forensic Institute are currently collecting samples of amphetamine speech. Finally, after investigating rhythmicity measures in production and simulation, I am integrating the results with corpus analysis of Hungarian phonotactics and experiments on the perception of speech rhythm.
