14.1561, Sum: Speech Perception Survey

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-14-1561. Mon Jun 2 2003. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 14.1561, Sum: Speech Perception Survey

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1)
Date:  Mon, 02 Jun 2003 16:21:39 +0000
From:  Bartek Plichta  <plichta at mailcarrier.org>
Subject:  Speech Perception Survey

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 02 Jun 2003 16:21:39 +0000
From:  Bartek Plichta  <plichta at mailcarrier.org>
Subject:  Speech Perception Survey

Re: Linguist 14.1488

Thank you to all of you who have replied to my query!

I have received quite a few messages from folks offering help. Many
people, including Isabelle Buchstaller, suggested LDC as a great
source of spoken word corpora. However, LDC subscriptions are
costly. I have looked at the descriptions of some of the LDC corpora
and, unfortunately, many of them contained telephone channel
speech. While this is great for discourse analysis, the bandwidth and
dynamic range of the telephone channel make such recordings very
unreliable for acoustic analysis.

Joe Picone was extremely kind and sent me a few samples of digitally
recorded 16-bit, 16,000 Hz word list samples of Southern Speech. This
was exactly what I needed. I would like to extend my gratitude to
Prof. Picone for sending me those files.

Malcah Yaeger-Dror made a few very interesting remarks concerning the
differences between word list and conversational data:

''First off, you might get some southern speech from Dennis Preston,
who's right there. I have some 'snippets' that i downloaded from the
radio that have monophthongization of (ay) more than what you have in
those word lists [although the last two guys do monophthongize
variably].''

Of course, I agree that the monophthongization of /ay/ may occur more
often in casual speech. I will look into such data and try to compare
those two different sets of data.

Alicia Spiegel, who studies pidgin/Creole languages, suggested that
Walt Wolfram might have interesting data to share. I will look into
that. Walt Wolfram has headed quite a few research projects in the
American South, as well as on the islands off the coast of NC. I will
write to him and ask about his collections.

My goal was to obtain several high quality Southern samples and to
find out about repositories of Southern Speech. Thanks to your help, I
was able to get exactly what I needed. Thank you!

Bartek Plicha

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG

Language-Family:  English; Code: IEFBBBAAA

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