The “Up” corpus: A corpus of speech samples across adulthood

Abstract We describe a speech corpus based on the “Up” series of documentary films by director Michael Apted, showing a set of individuals at seven year intervals over a period of 42 years. The corpus is meant to facilitate phonetic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research on age-related change in speech during young and middle-age adulthood. The corpus contains audio files, transcripts time-aligned at the level of utterance, word, and segment, F0 and vowel formant measurements of portions of the films, featuring eleven participants at ages 21 through 49. The corpus is freely available to researchers upon request.

[1]  William D. Raymond,et al.  The Buckeye corpus of conversational speech: labeling conventions and a test of transcriber reliability , 2005, Speech Commun..

[2]  G. Grewendorf,et al.  Phonetic cues to speaker age: A longitudinal study , 2009 .

[3]  Jonathan Harrington,et al.  Vocal aging effects on F0 and the first formant: A longitudinal analysis in adult speakers , 2010, Speech Commun..

[4]  Dan Jurafsky,et al.  Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. , 2003, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  Keith Johnson,et al.  Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech , 2012 .

[6]  S. D. Lima,et al.  How general is general slowing? Evidence from the lexical domain. , 1991, Psychology and aging.

[7]  Graeme Hirst,et al.  Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists , 2011, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[8]  Elizabeth Shriberg,et al.  A corpus analysis of patterns of age-related change in conversational speech. , 2010, Psychology and aging.

[9]  Michael A. Arbib,et al.  The handbook of brain theory and neural networks , 1995, A Bradford book.

[10]  L. Ramig,et al.  Aging speech: Physiological and sociological aspects , 1986 .

[11]  J. Harrington,et al.  Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts , 2000, Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

[12]  T. D. Hanley,et al.  Vocal aging. , 1959, Geriatrics.

[13]  P. Eckert Variation and the indexical field 1 , 2008 .

[14]  C. Fowler,et al.  Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English , 1997 .

[15]  Thomas Wiben Jensen,et al.  Body - Language - Communication , 2014 .

[16]  P. Mather The Social Stratification of /r/ in New York City , 2012 .

[17]  Richard Wright,et al.  The Hyperspace Effect: Phonetic Targets Are Hyperarticulated. , 1993 .

[18]  David B. Pisoni,et al.  Intelligibility of normal speech I: Global and fine-grained acoustic-phonetic talker characteristics , 1996, Speech Commun..

[19]  P. Trudgill NORWICH REVISITED: RECENT LINGUISTIC CHANGES IN AN ENGLISH URBAN DIALECT , 1988 .

[20]  M Meisel Jurgen,et al.  Language change across the lifespan , 2013 .

[21]  Grover Hudson,et al.  PHONOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE , 2004 .

[22]  Rebecca Treiman,et al.  The English Lexicon Project , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[23]  Gillian Sankoff,et al.  Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French , 2007 .

[24]  Diane Kewley-Port,et al.  Talker differences in clear and conversational speech: acoustic characteristics of vowels. , 2007, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[25]  Yuichi Ueda,et al.  A real-time formant tracker based on the inverse filter control method , 2007 .

[26]  Lorraine Olson Ramig,et al.  The Aging Voice: A Review, Treatment Data and Familial and Genetic Perspectives , 2001, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica.

[27]  Jonathan Harrington,et al.  An acoustic analysis of 'happy-tensing' in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts , 2006, J. Phonetics.

[28]  L. Ramig,et al.  Effects of physiological aging on selected acoustic characteristics of voice. , 1983, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[29]  Mark Liberman,et al.  Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus , 2008 .

[30]  Margaret Maclagan,et al.  The ONZE corpus , 2007 .

[31]  B. Lindblom Spectrographic Study of Vowel Reduction , 1963 .

[32]  D R Wekstein,et al.  Linguistic ability in early life and cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life. Findings from the Nun Study. , 1996, JAMA.

[33]  W. S. Brown,et al.  Speaking rate and fundamental frequency as speech cues to perceived age. , 2008, Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation.

[34]  E. Mysak,et al.  Disfluency and rate characteristics of young adult, middle-aged, and older males. , 1987, Journal of Communication Disorders.

[35]  René Arnaud,et al.  The development of the progressive in 19th century English: A quantitative survey , 1998, Language Variation and Change.

[36]  W. Endres,et al.  Voice spectrograms as a function of age, voice disguise, and voice imitation. , 1971, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[37]  Karen P. Corrigan,et al.  Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement , 2007 .

[38]  Antje S. Meyer,et al.  Age-related effects on speech production: A review , 2006 .

[39]  B. Lindblom Articulatory Activity in Vowels , 1964 .