About

Prof. Sandra Disner is a linguistic expert with extensive experience in providing consultation and expert testimony in various aspects of linguistics. Her expertise encompasses trademark law, where she applies linguistic rigor to issues such as generic status, consumer confusion, lexicography, historical development, syntactic flexibility, prescribed usage, phonetic similarity, and psycholinguistic analysis. She specializes in speaker identification, utilizing acoustic and phonetic analysis to determine speaker characteristics, dialect, vocal traits, and pronunciation features, as well as guiding the introduction of phonetic evidence in forensic contexts. Additionally, she focuses on word use in text and discourse, analyzing formal aspects of word and phrase structure, semantic content, and prevalent usage. Her work includes enhanced transcription techniques employing digital editing tools and sound spectrography to clarify recorded speech, as well as expert translation services across multiple languages, leveraging her background as a U.S. State Department translator. Prof. Disner also evaluates speech technology outputs, such as speech synthesizers and recognition devices, with particular attention to mispronunciations and mistranscriptions. Her contributions reflect a comprehensive application of linguistic principles across legal, forensic, translation, and technological domains.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Acoustics
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Mapping perceptual vowel spaces in native and foreign language: Persian learners of English compared with American native speakers

  2020 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  In this paper we argue that a comparison of vowel systems of L1 and L2 should not be limited to measuring formants and vowel duration in speech production but should also include a contrastive study of the perceptual representations of the vowel systems entertained by native and non‐native users of the target language. An incorrect perceptual representation of the target sounds often lies at the heart of pronunciation difficulties of L2 speakers. To facilitate such perceptual research the present paper offers a universal vowel space in which 43 artificial sounds are sampled at perceptually equidistant steps along the dimensions of vowel height (7 steps), backness/lip rounding (9 steps). Duration can be added as an additional variable in as many steps as required by the researcher. The facility was provisionally tested in a study of the perceptual representation of the monophthongs of American English by American native listeners and by Persian learners of English. Several ways of analyzing the results of such a study are presented. The results show that native listeners distinguish tense and lax members of vowel pairs in English primarily by differences in vowel quality, while the Persian L2 listeners use vowel duration as the primary cue and largely ignore the quality cue.

  Publisher

• Forensic Linguistics

  2013-10-28 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Examining the voice bar

  Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2012-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In a spectrogram of a human vowel sound, it is possible to observe the formant resonances which define the vowel auditorily. It is usually also possible to observe an emphasized frequency below F1, which has often been called the voice bar. Although recognition of the voice bar dates back to 19th century phonetics, it has never been the subject of a specific investigation. As a result, the nature and origin of the voice bar remain mysterious. Recent work on voice source synthesis [C. d'Alessandro et al., eNTERFACE 2005 Proc. pp. 52--61] has explained the appearance of an emphasized frequency in the neighborhood of 200 Hz--simply, it results from the frequency peak of the radiated source spectrum. Yet many speech scientists continue to ignore the voice bar, even to the point of denying its reality. Measurements of the voice bar in a number of different speakers and languages will be clearly shown in this paper, using reassigned spectrograms and linear prediction spectral estimates. The proper recognition of the voice bar can begin with this preliminary study, whose results largely corroborate the recently developed theory.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining the voice bar

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011-10-01

  articleSenior author

  In a spectrogram of a human vowel sound, it is possible to observe the formant resonances which define the vowel auditorily. It is usually also possible to observe an emphasized frequency below F1, which has often been called the voice bar. Although recognition of the voice bar dates back to 19th century phonetics, it has never been the subject of a specific investigation. As a result, the nature and origin of the voice bar remain mysterious. Recent work on voice source synthesis [C. d'Alessandro etal., eNTERFACE 2005 Proceedings, pp. 52–61] has explained the appearance of an emphasized frequency in the neighborhood of 200 Hz–simply, it results from the frequency peak of the radiated source spectrum. Yet many speech scientists continue to ignore the voice bar, even to the point of denying its reality. Measurements of the voice bar in a number of different speakers and languages will be clearly shown in this paper, using reassigned spectrograms and linear prediction spectral estimates. The voice bar has confused phoneticians for over a century, and has often confounded efforts to measure F1. The proper recognition of the voice bar can begin with this preliminary study.

  PublisherDOI

• The fine structure of phonation as a biometric.

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The reassigned spectrogram, an enhanced time-frequency display that has been proposed as a means of focusing in on the details of the phonation process [S. A. Fulop and S. F. Disner, “Advanced time-frequency displays applied to forensic speaker identification,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 2530 (2009)] was used to examine a set of sustained vowels produced by 16 speakers of American English. Certain characteristics, such as the relative amplitudes of the formants, the presence or absence of a so-called “voice bar,” and evidence of secondary excitation within a single glottal period, appear to be rather stable across repetitions of the same vowel by the same speaker, but divergent across speakers. The possibility of this method being used to corroborate conventional methods of forensic speaker identification is thus afforded a measure of support.

  PublisherDOI

• Advanced time-frequency displays applied to forensic speaker identification.

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009-04-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Forensic phoneticians have long utilized conventional spectrograms as the basis of the the auditory-acoustic method of speaker identification. Recent investigations [S. A. Fulop and K. Fitz, “Using the reassigned spectrogram to obtain a voiceprint,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 3337 (2006); S. A. Fulop and S. Disner, “The reassigned spectrogram as a tool for voice identification,” Int. Congress of Phonetic Sciences XVI, 1853–1856 (2007)] have suggested that a newer technology, i.e., the reassigned spectrogram, may be at least as valuable in the service of speaker identification. The present paper describes methods for forensic speaker identification using enhanced time-frequency displays including reassigned spectrograms and Zhao-Atlas-Marks distributions. Identification methods which employ the aforementioned displays are compared with the more established auditory-acoustic method, using recordings of 10 speakers saying several short phrases two times each. The results point to the efficacy of these newer time-frequency displays for speaker identification, particularly when used to corroborate conventional methods. One important development is the ability to focus on the detailed time-frequency features of the phonation process, thereby obtaining a new speech biometric indicative of vocal cord dynamics.

  PublisherDOI

• Advanced time-frequency displays applied to forensic speaker identification

  Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2009-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  have suggested that a newer technology, i.e., the reassigned spectrogram, may be at least as valuable in the service of speaker identification. The present paper describes methods for forensic speaker identification which use these enhanced time-frequency displays. The identification methods are compared with the more established auditory-acoustic method, using recordings of 28 speakers saying several short phrases two times each. The results point to the efficacy of these newer time-frequency displays for speaker identification, particularly when used to corroborate conventional methods. One important development is the ability to focus on the detailed time-frequency features of the phonation process, thereby obtaining a new speech biometric indicative of vocal cord dynamics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The reassigned spectrogram as a tool for voice identication

  Analytical Chemistry · 2007-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Protein immobilization is particularly significant in proteomics, interactomics, and in vitro drug screening. It is an essential primary step for numerous biological techniques that rely on immobilized proteins with controlled orientation, high conformational stability, and high activity (CHH). These have challenged the current immobilization strategy and demanded increasing efforts for an efficient method to meet the CHH immobilization in a single step. Herein, we proposed a covalent inhibitor-based, one-step method for G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) immobilization inspired by the covalent reaction between an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-tag and its inhibitor ibrutinib. We immobilized endothelin receptor A (ETA) containing a fusion EGFR tag onto an ibrutinib-coated macroporous silica gel. The immobilized ETA proved to have demonstrable ligand-binding activity and specificity, thus resulting in a chromatographic technology allowing receptor-ligand interaction analysis and lead identification. Such immobilization method is attractable, owing to the properties of mild reacting conditions, fast rate, high yield, and good stability of the conjugated protein. It will be applicable to biochips, biosensors, and biocatalysts.

  PublisherDOI

• Vowels and Consonants

  2000-10-11 · 172 citations

  bookSenior author
  Publisher

• WPP, No. 58: Vowel Quality: The relation between Universal and Language-specific Factors - eScholarship

  1983-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  u E i O U A e Vowel Qudlity the relation between universal and ldngudge-specific factors i e u t V a C 36 Ul _J e i a a D i o Ul e 5dndrd Ferrari Disner o u t ae i D o a e a o i e y ce. i a aa y UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics No. 56

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sean A. Fulop

  California State University, Fresno

  8 shared

• Peter Ladefoged

  2 shared

• Zs. Lengyel

  1 shared

• Naeimeh Afshar

  1 shared

• Anne Cochran

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Margaret E. Lundy

  Western University

  1 shared

• Fang-Ying Hsieh

  1 shared

• Sz. Bátyi

  1 shared