Differentiation of malicious and non-malicious fire-alarm calls using multidimensional scaling

A pilot study was carried out to determine whether malicious and non-malicious fire alarm calls could be distinguished on the basis of their psycholinguistic attributes. Eight malicious and eight non-malicious calls were compared in terms of the number of speech errors of various kinds in the call. Using multi-dimensional scalogram analysis (MSA-I), it was possible to differentiate the two types of call on the basis of the over-all configuration of speech behaviour within the call.