Forensic Transcription and the Challenge of Segmental and Suprasegmental Cues

Despite the growing importance of audio in forensic settings, to date there are no standardized guidelines for transcribing intercepted speech materials or police interviews. Transcriptions are also usually confounded as transduction, without acknowledging the importance of segmental and suprasegmental cues in shaping communication. Furthermore, these cues have been shown not only to vary regularly in connected speech, but also to condition our perception of the semantic content of a dialogue or sentence. This paper addresses the topic of forensic transcription by presenting a small experiment that was conducted on two Italian faked intercepted audios and transcribed by four audio forensic experts without specific linguistic training. The results, albeit preliminary, show a general misunderstanding or over-interpretation of prosodic cues, whereas segmental connected speech phenomena (e.g., syllable elision) were mistranscribed or interpreted as regional cues. In line with recent literature in forensic linguistics, these results mark the importance of in-depth linguistic training for transcribers.