A new speech corpus for studying subglottal acoustics in speech production, perception, and technology.

Abstract

Subglottal resonances have received increasing attention in recent studies of speech production, perception, and technology. They affect voice production, divide vowels and consonants into discrete categories, affect vowel perception, and are useful in automatic speech recognition. We present a new speech corpus of simultaneous microphone and (subglottal) accelerometer recordings of 25 adult male and 25 adult female speakers of American English (AE), between 22 and 25 years of age. Additional recordings of 50 gender-balanced bilingual Spanish/AE speaking adults, as well as 100 child speakers of Spanish and AE, are under way. The AE adult corpus consists of 35 monosyllables (14 “hVd” and 21 “CVb” words, where C is [b, d, g], and V includes all AE monophthongs and diphthongs) in a phonetically neutral carrier phrase (“I said a ____ again”), with 10 repetitions of each word by each speaker, resulting in 17 500 individual microphone (and accelerometer) waveforms. Hand-labeling of the target vowel in each utterance is currently under way. The corpus fills a gap in the literature on subglottal acoustics and will be useful for future studies in speech production, perception, and technology. It will be freely available to the speech research community. [Work supported in part by the NSF.]