Biography
I am a second-year PhD student, funded by the AHRC, in collaboration with the National Crime Agency, and facilitated by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. My project aims to look at the relationship between voice similarity and voice quality. I'm supervised by Dr Kirsty McDougall, for whom I also work as a Research Assistant on a project looking at speech disfluencies in Aboriginal Australian English.
For the last four years, I have also been the Cambridge-based Research Assistant on the IVIP (Improving Voice Identification Procedures) project, assisting with planning, designing, and running experiments, preparing and delivering conference talks and posters, and writing up articles for publication in academic journals. Recently, our paper on accent stereotypes in forensic contexts attracted a lot of media attention, and was featured on the Lexis Podcast, BBC Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Belfast, and in publications such as the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent and Courthouse News, amongst others. I've been invited to speak on some discussion panels on accent bias and prejudice, including at the Modern Cockney Festival.
I completed my undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and then went on to the renowned MSc in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York, where my final project looked at vowel trajectories and /r/ tapping in young British Pakistani men in Manchester and London. Whist in York I also worked as a Research Assistant on a WikiDialects project, and 'Geordie? Mackem? Smoggie? Dialect differences in the North East of England.'
Grants:
International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics
Title: DIVERSE: Database of Individual Variation in English by Recording style and SEx.
Multichannel recordings of female SSBE speakers for forensic phonetics.
Location: University of Cambridge
Collaborators: Chloe Patman, Kirsty McDougall and Paul Foulkes
Date: January-December 2025
Grant: £1,500
Research
I’m interested in the relationship between different measures of voice similarity, specifically in the context of forensic phonetics. Previously, in my work on the IVIP project, we found that listeners perceive voices as sounding more different from one another when they have a more ‘common’ pitch value than when they have an unusual pitch value. My PhD extends this investigation to measures of voice quality to understand whether listeners perceive certain voice quality settings as making a voice sound more or less similar to other voices. I will investigate how this relates to extracted acoustic measures of distinctiveness.
Publications
Paver, A., Wright, D., Braber, N., & Pautz, N. (2025). Stereotyped accent judgements in forensic contexts: Listener perceptions of social traits and types of behaviour. Frontiers in Communication, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1462013
Pautz, N., McDougall, K., Mueller-Johnson, K., Nolan, F., Paver, A., & Smith, H. M. J. (2024). Time to reflect on voice parades: The influence of reflection and retention interval duration on earwitness performance. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(1), e4162. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4162
McDougall, K., Paver, A., & Nolan, F. (2023). Voice distinctiveness: An investigation of the role of speakers’ position in a population with respect to f0. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 3790–3794.
Pautz, N., McDougall, K., Mueller-Johnson, K., Nolan, F., Paver, A., & Smith, H. M. J. (2023). Identifying unfamiliar voices: Examining the system variables of sample duration and parade size. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(12), 2804–2822. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231155738
Jat, S. C., McDougall, K., & Paver, A. (2023). Pausing and the ‘Othello Error’: Patterns of pausing in truthful and deceptive speech in the DyViS database. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 30(1), 87–118. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.24331
Teaching and Supervisions
Li6 Phonetics undergraduate supervision
MPhil Linguistics - Phonetic Variation Seminar
Other Professional Activities
Research Assistant on ESRC-funded project 'Improving Voice Identification Procedures’ 2020-present
Research Assistant on CHRG-funded project ‘Sociophonetic Variation in Aboriginal and Mainstream Australian Englishes: A Study of Disfluency Features’ 2023-present
Professional membership: International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics
British Association of Academic Phoneticians
International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics
