SpiCE: Speech in Cantonese and English

Authors: Khia A. JohnsonMolly BabelIvan FongNancy Yiu
Updated: Thu 20 May 2021
Source: https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/MJOXP3
Type: speech-database
Languages: cantonese, english
Keywords: bilingualconversationcorpuscantoneseenglish
Open Access: yes
License: CC BY 4.0
Documentation: https://spice-corpus.readthedocs.io/
Publications: Johnson (2021), Johnson et al. (2020)
Citation: Johnson, K. A. (2021). SpiCE: Speech in Cantonese and English. Scholars Portal Dataverse. Version 1. https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/MJOXP3; Johnson, K. A., Babel, M., Fong, I., & Yiu, N. (2020). SpiCE: A New Open-Access Corpus of Conversational Bilingual Speech in Cantonese and English. Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 4089–4095.
Summary:

This is the Speech in Cantonese and English (SpiCE) corpus. SpiCE is an audio corpus of conversational Cantonese-English bilingual speech recorded in Vancouver, Canada during 2018-2020. The corpus includes high-quality recordings of 34 early bilinguals in both English and Cantonese. Participants completed a sentence reading task, storyboard narration, and conversational interview in each language. These different speech tasks are available in a single audio file for each language for each talker. A Praat textgrid file accompanies each audio file. The textgrids provide hand-corrected orthographic transcription and phoneme-level forced-alignment in Cantonese and English. As an open-access language resource, SpiCE will promote bilingualism research for a typologically distinct pair of languages, of which Cantonese remains understudied despite there being millions of speakers around the world. The SpiCE corpus is especially well-suited for phonetic research on conversational speech, and enables researchers to study cross-language within-speaker phenomena for a diverse group of early Cantonese-English bilinguals. These are areas with few existing high-quality resources. Corpus documentation is available at: https://spice-corpus.readthedocs.io/.