Interspeech in Lyon

I spent several days at Interspeech—the annual conference of the International Speech Association (ISCA) during August. I presented a poster in which I explained the purpose, design, and current status of the Crosslinguistic Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena (CCHP). This presentation was intended to be the formal introduction of the corpus project to the academic community. I emphasized the following points.

• Motivation—to organize a corpus of spontaneous speech in which intra-speaker comparison are possible across first and second languages.
• Design—recordings of each participant include read speech and spontaneous speech using parallel elicitation tasks in their first and second language.
• Collection procedure—recordings in soundproof room and saved as mono 16-bit 48kHz. Transcription of speech, with annotation of filled pauses and hesitation phenomena done by two transcribers independently with a third checker to resolve differences.
• Intended users—The corpus is intended for use by researchers and teachers.

I also presented some basic results from the corpus showing that some aspects of second language speech is highly correlated with first language speech behavior. I had a lot of discussion with many people and could get some really good comments and suggestions about how to proceed with the use of the corpus. Interested people can access my poster here and the full paper here. From now on, anyone needing to cite the corpus should cite this paper. For convenience, here is the text so you can copy and paste it as needed.

2013, August. Rose, R. "Crosslinguistic Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena: A corpus for investigating first and second language speech performance". Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2013), Lyon, France, pp. 992-996.

[Note: This post was published in August 2015 but has been dated in order to reflect the actual timing of the events described here.]