The Nationwide Speech Project: A new corpus of American English dialects

Abstract

Perceptual and acoustic research on dialect variation in the United States requires an appropriate corpus of spoken language materials. Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker. The Nationwide Speech Project corpus was designed to contain a large amount of speech produced by male and female talkers representing the primary regional varieties of American English. Five male and five female talkers from each of six dialect regions in the United States were recorded reading words, sentences, passages, and in interviews with an experimenter, using high quality digital recording equipment in a sound-attenuated booth. The resulting corpus contains nearly an hour of speech from each of the 60 talkers that can be used in future research on the perception and production of dialect variation.