Methodology

We constructed an elicitation paragraph to be read by each subject. The paragraph is written in English, and uses common English words, but contains a variety of difficult English sounds and sound sequences. The paragraph contains practically all of the sounds of English.

Subjects are asked to read and agree to a standard Human Subjects Cover Letter. Each Subject is recorded individually in a quiet room. Subjects sit at a table and are approximately 8-10 inches from the microphone.

Subjects are asked a series of seven demographic questions:

1. Where were you born?
2. What is your native language?**
3. What other languages besides English and your native language do you know?
4. How old are you?
5. How old were you when you first began to study English?
6. How did you learn English? (academically or naturalistically)
7. How long have you lived in an english-speaking country? Which country?

**The archive lists each native language as self-reported by the subject. Where there may be another more common name for a subject's native language, it is listed on the individual language page in parentheses.

Subjects are then allowed to look at the elicitation paragraph for a minute or so, and they are permitted to ask about words that are unfamiliar.  Subjects then read the paragraph once into a high quality recording device. (Many of these recordings are done on a Sony TC-D5M using a Radio Shack 33-3001 unidirectional dynamic microphone, and on a Sony minidisk recorder. MDR-70, with a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo microphone) Every remote researcher must specify the type of recording device employed. (To submit a sample as a remote researcher, click here.)

The elicitation paragraph:
Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

The elicitation paragraph contains most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters of standard American English. See the sounds and their distributions in the paragraph.

Speech samples are digitized at 44.1KHz, 16-bit mono and are archived as uncompressed AIFF files. Copies of these files are compressed to 22.05 KHz. 16 bit mono, at IMA 4:1 and saved as Quicktime sound files for web delivery.

Phonetic transcriptions are derived from the recorded sample. 2 to 4 trained transcribers listen to each sample and reach a consensus for the final transcription.