A Corpus of Dutch Aphasic Speech: Sketching the Design and Performing a Pilot Study

In this thesis, a pilot study for the development of a corpus of Dutch aphasic speech (CoDAS) is presented. Given the lack of resources of this kind not only for Dutch but also for other languages, CoDAS will be able to set standards and will contribute to the future research in this area. A corpus of Dutch aphasic speech should fulfill at least three requirements. First, it should encode a plausible sample of contemporary Dutch as spoken by aphasic patients. That is, it should include speech representing different types of aphasia as well as various communication settings. Secondly, the speech fragments should be documented with the relevant metadata which should include information about the speaker and aphasia. Thirdly, the corpus should be enriched with various kinds of linguistic information. Given the special character of the speech contained in CoDAS, we cannot simply carry over the design and the annotation protocols of existing corpora, such as SDC or CHILDES. However, they have been assumed as starting point. In our pilot study, we have established the basic requirements with respect to text types, metadata, and annotation levels that CoDAS should fulfill. In this respect, we have investigated whether and how the procedures and protocols for the annotation and transcription used for the SDC should be adapted in order to annotate and transcribe the aphasic speech properly. In particular, for the orthographic transcription and the part-of-speech tagging, suggestions for improvement of the existing protocols have been given. On the other hand, the phonetic transcription procedure assumedwithin the SDC can be adopted without major modifications.

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