Introduction

The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English is based on hundreds of recordings of natural speech from all over the United States, representing a wide variety of people of different regional origins, ages, occupations, and ethnic and social backgrounds. It reflects many ways that people use language in their lives: conversation, gossip, arguments, on-the-job talk, card games, city council meetings, sales pitches, classroom lectures, political speeches, bedtime stories, sermons, weddings, and more.

Data

The three CD-ROM volumes in Part I contain 14 speech files of between 15-30 minutes each, from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Collected by: University of California, Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Discourse, Director John W. Du Bois (UCSB), Associate Editors: Wallace L. Chafe (UCSB), Charlese Meyer (UMass, Boston), and Sandra A. Thompson (UCSB). The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English is part of the International Corpus of English (Charles W. Meyer, Director), representing the American Component.

Each speech file is accompanied by a transcript in which phrases are time stamped with respect to the audio recording. Personal names, place names, phone numbers, etc., in the transcripts have been altered to preserve the anonymity of the speakers and their acquaintances and the audio files have been filtered to make these portions of the recordings unrecognizable.

For the latest information on this corpus, please refer to the following sites devoted to it:

http:// http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/sbcorpus.html
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/SBCSAE

Samples

For an example of the data in this corpus, please examine these samples of the recordings and transcripts:

• Speech(large)
• Transcripts

Updates