Turns the path's physical apparatus and its perception evidence against each other, and the perception evidence wins. Listener studies show accuracy climbing with the amount of learned speech in the signal: about 60% from a sustained isolated vowel (Walton and Orlikoff 1994, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37(4) 738-745), above 70% from a single word (Purnell, Idsardi and Baugh 1999, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18, 10-30), and about 80% from short read words for most speaker groups (Thomas and Reaser 2004, Journal of Sociolinguistics 8, 54-86). More learned material, more accuracy — the pattern points at dialect and voice quality rather than at the vocal folds.
The article explains linguistic profiling and reports a matched-guise experiment in which the same four women recorded the same script twice, once in Standard American English and once in a second di…