Spontaneous speech database design for suprasegmental characteristics in Asian L2 English
Tanya Visceglia, Chiu-yu Tseng · 2009
This research is part of the ongoing multinational collaboration “Asian English Speech cOrpus Project ” (AESOP), whose aim is to build up a speech corpus representing the varieties of English spoken in Asia. The present paper describes tasks designed to elicit production of a comprehensive range of English segmental and suprasegmental characteristics in the form of spontaneous speech. Segmental and suprasegmental properties of spontaneous speech have been shown to differ significantly from those of read speech; nevertheless, much of the data used to develop man-machine speech communication systems has, for the most part, been based on read speech. Experiments designed to elicit a full range of L2 English segmental and prosodic features in spontaneous speech could efficiently collect an inventory of these features in a database, which could be used for further phonetic studies as well as modeling and ICT tool development tailored to the Asian L2 English-speaking population.