ALLSSTAR Group

ALLSSTAR (Archive of L1 andL2 Scripted and Spontaneous Transcripts and Recordings) is a collaborative research project being conducted in the Speech Communication Research Group under the direction of Ann Bradlow in the Linguistics Department. The team consists of third year PhD students Lisa Hesterberg and Jenna Luque, second year PhD students Lauren Ackerman and Laura Ann Burchfield, and our Research Support Specialist (and NU alum) Kelsey Mok. Most research looking at foreign-accented English focuses on the differences in sound structure between the speaker’s native language and English (language-specific aspects of pronunciation). However, it ignores what each individual brings to pronunciation in both their native and second language (speaker-specific aspects of pronunciation). The ALLSSTAR corpus was designed to address just this type of question. It contains recordings of both scripted (sentences and paragraphs) and spontaneous (narratives and monologues) speech in a speaker’s native language as well as English and recordings of native English speakers. This allows us to compare non-native English to native English, other languages to English, and a speaker’s native language to his/her non-native English. The first comparison allows us to understand the differences between native English and non-native English from a language specific standpoint. The second comparison allows us to compare across languages to look for language universals. And the final comparison allows us to examine the contribution of each talker to both of their languages. We believe this triangle approach is the best way to understand both language and speaker contributions to non-native English intelligibility. At this time ALLSSTAR has recordings from 50 people in 18 different languages (and 20 native English speakers). We are currently running preliminary analyses on speech timing and plan to expand the corpus to include new languages and more speakers of the languages already represented.