Guan Xin，pursuing her doctoral degree in Foreign linguistics and applied linguistics, is interested in studies on Forensic linguistics. She has been working in Discourse analysis, Discourse Information Analysis and Forensic voice comparison.

FSR, the forensic application of speaker recognition, is the decision-making process during which one or more samples of an unknown voice will be compared with one or more samples of a known voice and then a decision whether they are matched or not has to be made. So far, forensic phoneticians and telecommunication engineers are the main researchers in this field, whose achievements have contributed to the diverse current FSR methods in practice. Forensic voice comparison is supposed to provide investigation and judgment some clues and evidence. Speaker recognition, authentification and integrity of recordings, speaker profiling, disputed utterance and audio analysis all fall in this category. Thanks to the popularization of diverse recording equipments and simple and non-technical voice-editing softwares, and the nature of accessibility, voice materials are playing more important roles in legal field and are absorbing more attention, which means there are a lot to do in this field for forensic linguistic researchers. Then come the key questions: what forensic linguistic researchers can handle and how to handle them as legal materials. However, there has been being a gap between ‘unrealistic test material’ in research and real voice materials involved in legal practice, and real-world conditions exercise ‘drastic effect’ on FSR (Rose, 1995; 1996; 2002), and evaluation and validation of different methods are absent ( Cambier-Langeveld, 2007). It seems apparent that the current FSR research and development could not properly fulfil the demands of legal practice. The intended research therefore aims at the current situation and attempts to bridge the gap and to make FSR research more applicable. To facilitate her research, she has studied statistics, read classical books and papers on methodology and academic writing in detail, and gone through books and papers on forensic linguistics, especially, those on forensic voice comparison, so as to have in mind the research trend and developing directions. The recommended literatures include books and papers by Rose, Broeders, Nalon, Morrison, Hollien, Wang Yingli, Yang Junjie, and Zhang Cuiling, etc, which are good resources of basic knowledge on forensic voice comparison, especially, FSR.

In order to gain knowledge and make contribution, hardworking is the companion and enough knowledge accumulation; thorough understanding, keen observation and firm academic faith are the premise.