The Wildcat corpus of native- and foreign-accented English

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2007-05, Vol.121 (5_Supplement), p.3072-3072
• Main Authors: Bradlow, Ann R., Baker, Rachel E., Choi, Arim, Kim, Midam, Van Engen, Kristin J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4808527

For a wide range of socio-political reasons, many conversations across the globe today are between interlocutors who do not share a mother tongue. As a resource for investigating the nature and broad implication of speech communication in a global context, we are currently developing a large database of speech recordings from native and non-native speakers of English. A key feature of this database is that, in addition to providing recordings of scripted materials, the speakers are recorded in pairs (all possible pairing of native and non-native English speakers) as they work together on a novel, interactive, goal-oriented task. The final corpus will include fully segmented and phonetically aligned digital recordings of both the scripted and unscripted speech samples along with complete orthographic transcriptions. We are currently using a first version of this database to track speaker-listener alignment over the course of a conversation, to compare phonetic features of speech addressed to native versus to non-native speakers, and to assess communication efficiency across various native and non-native speaker pairings (e.g., how long does it take for a team-based task to reach successful completion when one, both, or neither of the team members is a non-native speaker?)