Jessica Wormald

Profile

Biography

I am a lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. I am currently leading a University PACE funded project to expand the range of services offered by the Forensic Speech Science team within the department.

My primary research interests are in forensic speech science and sociophonetics. My PhD investigated the development of contact varieties in the British cities Bradford and Leicester. I analysed speech from recordings of community members using auditory, acoustic, automatic and articulatory methods. I worked for six years as a forensic consultant at J P French Associates where I specialised in speaker comparison and transcription. Between July 2022  and September 2024 I worked as a PDRA on the ESRC funded Person-specific Automatic Speaker Recognition project at the University of York exploring speaker specific impacts on automatic speaker recognition performance (ES/W001241/1). Since my PhD, I have regularly taught on a variety of modules in sociophonetics and forensic speech science at the University of York as well as other workshops and training.

Career

• Lecturer in Linguistics
  University of York (2024-)
  
  
• Postdoctoral Research Associate - Person-specific Automatic Speaker Recognition
  University of York (2021 - 2024)
   
• Forensic Consultant (Speech science)
  J P French Associates (2016 - 2021)
   
• PhD in Linguistics
  University of York (2012 - 2016)
   
• MSc Forensic Speech Science
  University of York (2009 - 2010)
   
• BA English Language and Linguistics
  University of York (2006 - 2009)

Research

Research

My research interests are in forensic speech science, phonetics, and sociophonetics. I am particularly interested in individual speaker variability and how our ability to characterise the whole voice and examine as wide a range of features as possible offers opportunities to better understand speakers. Having worked as a forensic speech scientist for six years I am also interested in research which leads directly to improvements in forensic practice, particularly methodological developments and the combination of auditory, acoustic and automatic techniques.

External activity

External activity

Publications

Sharma, D. & Wormald, J. (in preparation) British Asian English. Chapter to appear in Fox, S (ed.) Language in the British Isles. 

Harrison, P. & Wormald, J. (in preparation) Forensic transcription and questioned utterance analysis. Chapter to appear in McDougall, K., Hudson, T., & Nolan, F. (eds.) Oxford handbook of Forensic Phonetics.

Gully, A., Harrison, P., Hughes, V., Rhodes, R. and Wormald, J. (2022) How Voice Analysis Can Help Solve Crimes. Frontiers for Young Minds 10(702664), DOI: 10.3389/frym.2022.702664

Hughes, V. & Wormald, J. (2020) Sharing innovative methods, data and knowledge across sociophonetics and forensic speech science. Linguistics Vanguard: Special Issue on Innovative Methods in Sociophonetics 5(4), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2018-0062

Brown, G. & Wormald, J. (2017) Automatic Sociophonetics: exploring corpora with a forensic accent recognition system. JASA: Special Issue on Advancing Methods for Analyzing Dialect Variation, 142 (1), p.422-433

Kirkham, S. & Wormald, J. (2015) Acoustic and Articulatory Variation in British Asian English Liquids. Proceedings of ICPhS XVIII. Glasgow.

Wormald, J. (2015) Dynamic Variation in ‘Panjabi-English’: Analysis of F1 and F2 trajectories for face /eɪ/ and goat /əʊ/. Proceedings of ICPhS XVIII. Glasgow.

Wormald, J. (2014) Bradford Panjabi-English: the Realisation of face and goat. YPL Special Issue: Proceedings of the first PARLAY conference. Issue 1, p.118-138.

Selected presentations & invited talks

Wormald, J. (2022) Acting as an Expert Witness. Workshop on combined issues in FL & FSS: "The linguist in the witness box", Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, UK. 26th May. [Invited]

Wormald, J. (2019) Forensic Speech Science. UCL Voice Conference, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, UK. 29th November. [Invited - available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp1eSiA8Kck]

Wormald, J. (2019) Listening to crime: working as a forensic speech analyst. CLCR Research Seminar Series. University of Cardiff, UK. 3rd April. [Invited]

Wormald, J. (2018) A Life in Headphones: Working as a Forensic Speech Analyst. Presentation given at the Institute of Acoustics: Speech and Hearing Group AGM. London, UK. 21st June. [Invited]

Hughes, V., Wormald, J., Gold, E., Kendall, T., Rose, Y. and Schilling, N. (2017) Sociolinguistics and forensic speech science: knowledge- and data-sharing. Workshop given at NWAV46. University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. 2nd November.

Rhodes, R., French, J.P., Harrison, P., Hughes, V., Kirchhübel, C. and Wormald, J. (2017) Which questions, propositions and ‘relevant populations’ should a speaker comparison expert assess? IAFPA conference. Split, Croatia. 9th July.

Hughes, V. and Wormald, J. (2017) WikiDialects: a resource for assessing typicality in forensic voice comparison. IAFPA conference. Split, Croatia. 9th July. [Poster]

Hughes, V. and Wormald, J. (2017) Assessing typicality in forensic voice comparison: How can sociophonetics help? IMS. University of Edinburgh, 19th April.

Brown, G., Jenkins, M., Wormald, J. and Watt, D. (2017) A tin ear for accents? Human vs. machine in accent classification and authentication tasks. IMS. University of Edinburgh, 19th April.

Wormald, J. (2016) Regional variation in Panjabi-English: a contact variety corpus. IAFPA conference. University of York, 24th July. [Poster]