Introduction

This file contains documentation on the Articulation Index, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LCD2005S22 and ISBN 1-58563-346-1.

The Articulation Index Corpus was partly inspired by the work of Harvey Fletcher, who performed a number of perceptual experiments involving English syllables during the first half of the 20th century. His term "articulation index" meant something like "perceptual index of syllables," where those syllables were not necessarily words, and reflected how well speakers could correctly identify syllables in the presence of noise. This corpus was created to facilitate similar experiments, as well as to potentially facilitate new methods in speech recognition research.

The basic concept behind the corpus is to record speakers pronouncing syllables of English, some of which might be real words, but most of which are nonsense syllables. The goal was to have each speaker say a set of 2,000 syllables common to all speakers, as well as a set of 20 syllables unique to that speaker. This goal was nearly met, but not precisely; see below for a description of the syllable inventory.

Samples

For an example of this corpus, please review this audio sample.

Content Copyright

© 2005 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania