Between individuality and accent identity in speech
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Manchester
Department Name: Arts Languages and Cultures
Abstract
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People |
ORCID iD |
| Patrycja Strycharczuk (Principal Investigator) |
| Description | The purpose of this award was to establish a collaboration between the University of Manchester and Bern University that will study the relationship between individuality and group membership in speech. The aim is to determine what specific type of speech features systematically identify individuals and what kind of speech features are likely to distinguish groups of speakers, such as speakers of the same accent. The key tool that will be used in this study will be the English Dialects App Corpus (EDAC) co-created by Prof Adrian Leemann (Bern). EDAC is an exceptionally rich resource, representing speech data from 3,500 speakers across the British Isles. However, a certain amount of data cleaning and pre-processing is needed in order to use this resource to address research questions in language and speech. Thanks to a research visit and a collaborative workshop funded by the award, we have achieved the following aims: - We have added automatically-generated annotations for the speech recordings in EDAC, which makes the corpus available for phonetic and sociophonetic research. - We have established the error rate in the written annotations, which allows us to plan for additional research support in future uses of the corpus. - We have investigated the demographic make-up of the corpus which leads to refinement of future research questions. - We have made concrete plans for further collaborative research projects, including two joint studies that are already underway and for a future joint grant application. |
| Exploitation Route | The addition of annotations to EDAC makes the corpus more usable for other researchers interested in using it. We have already shared the corpus with several researchers by request, and we have plans to make parts of the data publicly available, pending some further pre-processing. |
| Sectors | Other |
| Description | Mid-Career Fellowships |
| Amount | £134,386 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | MFSS24\240076 |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 08/2024 |
| End | 08/2025 |