German Alcohol Language Corpus - the Question of Dialect

Abstract

Speech uttered under the influence of alcohol is known to deviate from the speech of the same person when sober. This is an important feature in forensic investigations and could also be used to detect intoxication in the automotive environment. Aside from acoustic-phonetic features and speech content which have already been studied by others in this contribution we address the question whether speakers use dialectal variation or dialect words more frequently when intoxicated than when sober. We analyzed 300,000 recorded word tokens in read and spontaneous speech uttered by 162 female and male speakers within the German Alcohol Language Corpus. We found that contrary to our expectations the frequency of dialectal forms decreases significantly when speakers are under the influence. We explain this effect with a compensatory over-shoot mechanism: speakers are aware of their intoxication and that they are being monitored. In forensic analysis of speech this ‘awareness factor’ must be taken into account.

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