News

A new title in Cambridge Elements in Forensic Linguistics is available for free download till 7 June 2023, namely Forensic Linguistics in Australia: Origins, Progress and Prospects by Diana Eades, Helen Fraser and Georgina Heydon. Here is the book announcement circulated by the authors: Cambridge Elements is a newish monograph series publishing concise, original, succinct, authoritative, peer-reviewed, scholarly work […]

Another paper has recently been added to the Frontiers research topic Capturing Talk: The Institutional Practices Surrounding the Transcription of Spoken Language. This paper, called Transcribing and translating forensic speech evidence containing foreign languages—An Australian perspective, is by a colleague of the Hub, RMIT senior lecturer in translating and interpreting Dr. Miranda Lai. It contributes […]

(Last week the Hub gave a presentation at Monash University. Thanks to Prof Kate Burridge, Dr Howie Manns and their colleagues in Monash Linguistics for a wonderful welcome and a delicious lunch. Here are videos of the sections by Debbie Loakes and Lauren Harrington (who has been visiting the Hub from the University of York – now heading […]

The Hub is happy to be presenting in the famous and fun Linguistics in the Pub series at the famous and fun Naughton’s Hotel on Tuesday 28 March 6-8pm. Why not come along and enjoy a drink and some interesting discussion with us? Misunderstanding mishearing: Why linguistic science is needed to cure serious injustice in our […]

On Friday March 24th, Hub visitor Lauren Harrington will talk about Transcription of indistinct audio: are phoneticians at an advantage?  This will be an in-person event at The University of Melbourne (Babel Building, rm 407) at, 3.15pm. There will also be an online option (just get in touch with Hub members for the link). Abstract: […]

On Tuesday March 21st, the Hub will be giving a seminar at Monash University: Can the new generation of automatic speech recognition systems solve problems of forensic transcription – and what does the process of answering this question teach us about the human language capacity? Helen Fraser, Debbie Loakes, Lauren Harrington* Research Hub for Language […]

The Australian Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) was founded in 1967, and is said to be “unique in bringing together persons of professional standing from the legal, medical and scientific professions whom have contributed to the advancement or practice of forensic science”. The Hub is pleased to announce that Helen Fraser will be giving a […]

The Hub is known for its pioneering work in forensic transcription – but transcripts are used in many other sectors of society. As well, multiple branches of linguistic science use transcripts as the basis of research (e.g. phonetics, conversation and discourse analysis, language description and documentation, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics – not to mention other branches of […]

The Hub are happy to be back at work in 2023, with many activities planned for the start of the new year and beyond. Wrapping up 2022 In wrapping up the Hub’s activities in 2022, which included a symposium we hosted at The University of Melbourne, a visit to the SocioPhonAus workshop in Brisbane, and various […]

In November and December, the Hub will be presenting at two upcoming conferences. These are: ALS 2022 – The Australian Linguistics Society annual conference, to be held at The University of Melbourne (Nov 30- Dec 2). SST 2022 – The 18th Australasian Speech Science and Technology conference, to be held at ANU in Canberra (Dec […]

In 2018, Helen published a paper in the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences called ‘Assisting’ listeners to hear words that aren’t there: dangers in using police transcripts of indistinct covert recordings. This paper is highly relevant to our ongoing work in the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence, and we summarise the main findings […]

This week, the Hub travelled to Brisbane for the SocioPhonAus3 conference, held on July 11 and 12. This was hosted by Griffith University, at the Ship Inn on Southbank. A very nice venue, as you can see from our feature image. The small picture below also shows where we had our breaks and meals – […]

In the last month (June 8 and 9, 2022), the Hub ran a symposium called Transcription in Legal Contexts: Problems and Solutions. Day 1 was all about problems, while Day 2 was about solutions. We ran this event on campus at The University of Melbourne, and also had online attendees including many from the U.K […]

As of today, the Hub has a new open access publication – this is an article published in our special issue of Frontiers in Communication, called Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Have a Role in the Transcription of Indistinct Covert Recordings for Forensic Purposes?     Motivation for this study This study was motivated by […]

The Hub has had a busy month, with Helen coming to Melbourne (for the first time in two years!). We had some work to do together on a research project (which we will report on soon) and Helen gave two lectures about forensic linguistics in the first year Language course. The first lecture focused on […]