ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Shape display: task design and corpus collection

Janice Fon

This study introduces a new paradigm for spontaneous dialog elicitation and a small multilingual corpus collected using this paradigm. Pairs of subjects were seated in separate booths and were each given a felt-covered board and a bag of assorted felt pieces of various shapes and colors. The goal was to make the layout of the felt pieces the same on the two boards with the least moves. In order to test how accommodating the paradigm is to cross-linguistic/cross-cultural experimental designs, 32 subjects of three different languages, English, Mandarin (Guoyu and Putonghua), and Japanese participated in the study. Subjects found the paradigm entertaining and engaged themselves in the game without paying much conscious attention to their linguistic performances. The elicited dialogs were spontaneous enough to allow further phonetic and discourse research.