Sandra Ferrari Disner: Linguistic Expert

Sandra-Ferrari-Disner
Prof. Sandra Disner has provided consultation and expert testimony in linguistics on matters concerning:

Trademark Law —

Applying linguistic rigor to issues such as generic status and potential consumer confusion, with considerations of

lexicography
historical development
syntactic flexibility
prescribed usage
phonetic similarity
placement on a psycholinguistic confusion matrix
and other modes of linguistic analysis.

Speaker Identification —

Searching the speech signal for acoustic and phonetic indications of similarity, or dissimilarity, between an evidence recording and a speaker’s recorded exemplar.Applying linguistic principles to the determination of the speaker’s dialect, vocal characteristics (such as breathy or nasal), and specific pronunciation traits (such as a retracted [r] or hissed [t]).

Providing guidance for the introduction of phonetic evidence, with respect to

minimum required length of the recording
minimum spectral range
likelihood of mimicry or disguise
possible influence of listener expectations
overall reliability of earwitness testimony
evidence of tampering of the speech signal
and other forensic linguistic issues.

Word Use in Text and Discourse —

Formal aspects of word and phrase structure and usage
Identification of the prevalent usage of a word or phrase
Analysis of semantic content

Enhanced Transcription Techniques —

Using digital editing tools and sound spectrography to isolate, analyze and identify unclear words and phrases, or words and phrases of particular importance, in the transcript of a recorded text.

Expert Translation —

Providing insights into the precise lexical meaning and usage of words and phrases in the following list of languages. Dr. Disner has been a U.S. State Department translator of all these languages and has also developed video games and speech synthesis modules in all of them.

Spanish
French
Italian
German
English

Speech Technology —

Evaluating the output of commercial speech synthesizers and speech recognition devices, with a focus on mispronunciations or mistranscriptions, either systematic or limited to specific words, in all of the abovementioned languages.