Sandra Ferrari Disner: Linguistic Expert
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]).
- 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.