An International English Speech Corpus for Longitudinal Study of Accent Development

Rosemary Orr, Hugo Quené, Roeland van Beek, Thari Diefenbach, David A. van Leeuwen, Marijn Huijbregts

Abstract: If English is used intensively as a lingua franca in a multi-language community, do speakers then converge towards a single common accent? This speech corpus allows for longitudinal study to investigate the question of convergence by means of repeated speech recordings of students at an English-language college over a period of 5 years. We describe the content and collection of the corpus and the type of research that is envisaged, as well as tools used to manage and analyze the recordings, including automatic phone recognition for prosodic analyses; and intelligibility experiments using the SRT method.