The Ability of Forensic Handwriting Examiners to Judge the Quality of Signature Simulations in an Unfamiliar Writing System

This article addresses the question of whether forensic handwriting examiners (FHEs) can successfully apply forgery detection analysis to recognize forgeries in foreign signatures with which they are not familiar. Two FHEs who were fluent speakers and writers of Arabic and 2 who were unfamiliar with the Arabic language and script analyzed 100 freehand simulations of 2 Arabic signatures. They gave separate ranks to the accuracy with which each of elements of line quality, form, and proportion were simulated by each simulator. No significant differences were found between the assessments of the 2 teams of FHEs for each element. More research on other scripts, languages, and elements would be desirable to generalize the results.