LINGUIST List 15.1895

Tue Jun 22 2004

Qs: Vowel Speech Corpus; L2 Lexical Attrition

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Scott Drellishak, Speech Corpus for Neural Network Training
2. Mohammad Ghasemi, L2 lexical attrition

I am involved in a research project whose goal is to produce a
software system for the control of electronic devices using continuous
variables extracted from human speech. Part of this system will be a
neural network that recognizes various vowels and produces tracks of
pitch and formant frequencies. Training the neural network will
require a large amount of data that we're hoping to get from an
existing corpus, rather than creating it ourselves.

We are looking for a corpus that contains samples of many speakers
producing many vowels (preferably in a less reduced register) that
also contains human-validated pitch and formant (F1, F2, and F3)
tracks and, if possible, bandwidth information. A corpus that
contains more than just vowels is fine, since we can discard sections
of the samples that do not suit our needs.

If anyone knows of a corpus like this, either freely distributed or
requiring a fee, I would like to know how to get ahold of it.

I will post a summary of the replies that I receive. Thanks in
advance for your time.

Scott Drellishak
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 

Dear Linguist

I am an EFL graduate student. I have decided to investigate the extent
of L2 lexical attrition in high school students over summer holidays
when they recive no L2 input. As the period of nonuse of/ no exposure
to the L2 is only about 12 weeks, is it possible to consider such a
case as an attrition study? Many thanks in advance.

Mohammad Ghasemi
Isfahan University 

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG