الفهرس 
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Abstract
The subject of this thesis is to identify unknown speakers particularly from their speaking tempi represented in Speech Rate SR and Articulation Rate AR as temporal parameters.
The fundamental goal of this study, on the acoustical level, is to prove acoustically that every speaker has a significant speech rate SR and articulation rate AR through which the unknown speaker can be discriminated and to investigate which of them (SR or AR) could be more benefit for identifying unknown speakers and to what extent. Also, the present study is essentially concerned, on the perceptual level, with listeners’ perceptual abilities in perceiving and differentiating different speaking tempi for identifying unknown speakers in order to utilize this exceptional ability in forensic speaker identification FSI.
The most important characteristic of the temporal aspects of speech (represented in speech rate SR and articulation rate AR) that they are not easily disguised or imitated by accent or fundamental frequency leveling; so they could be useful for identifying unknown speakers particularly in forensic phonetic field.
This present thesis is beginning with a brief theoretical and experimental review of other work in linguistic literature focusing on the temporal aspect of speech (speech rate SR and articulation rate AR) for identifying unknown speakers. And then the speech rate SR and articulation rate AR of ten unknown speakers / informants are calculated. The speakers were recorded while talking spontaneously for a radio program. Only 30 seconds of speech are cut for each speaker from the entire episode. After that 60 naïve listeners are asked to listen carefully to the 10 unknown informants in order to mark the fastest speaker and the slowest speaker depending only on their ears.
The present study focuses on the speech rate SR and articulation rate AR variations of colloquial Arabic speakers and aims to provide some useful acoustical and perceptual data in order to be used in forensic phonetic filed.