The Parallel Impromptu Narrations Corpusat Bowling Green State Universityhttp://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/pinc/index.html |
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PINC Links English Hindi Japanese Spanish Turkish PINC Home Slips Pages BGSU Home Contact the Webmaster |
One good way of looking inside the human speech production system is to examine its output in as many languages as possible. This output may take the form of narratives, individual sentences, hesitations, restarts or errors in speech. All of these reveal aspects of the underlying mechanisms at work in producing speech. A better way would be to examine only parallel corpora of such data, that is, cross-linguistic material that has been recorded while holding social, situational and other factors constant. In this way, variation that does occur between languages can be attributed with confidence to the interaction of universal speech production mechanisms with the differing structures of the languages studied. The PINC is such a set of parallel corpora, consisting at present of 83 thirteen-minute narrations in English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish, together with a collection of speech errors produced in the course of the narrations. The PINC texts are being transcribed during the summer of 2001, and the transcripts will be made available at this site upon their completion. We anticipate having all 83 existing texts completed by September 2001, and hope to include more texts (in more languages) in the near future. For further information about this project and the methodology involved, please contact Sheri ells-Jensen or view her dissertation.
This work has been supported by The texts have been transcribed in their entirety according to the conventions described by Brian MacWhinney (2000) in The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Every attempt has been made to accurately use this code, however, to date, the files have not been run through the CLAN program for testing. Only some of the suggested transcription conventions have been implemented here. A full enumeration of what has been used and what passed over will be available soon. This should be consulted before using these data since it suggests some limitations of the data as currently available. This research would not have been possible without the four intrepid, articulate and incredibly patient Cat Tales language consultants: Shingo Imai, Arati Kirtikar, Luis Paris, and Yusuf Sahingur. They met incessant questions with grace and good humor, and never showed the weariness I'm sure they must have felt. I have never had more patient teachers, and I am honored to have had the chance to work with them. I am also grateful to the members of the Slips of the Tongue Reading Group at the University of Buffalo, especially Jeri Jaeger, I-Ping Wan, Luis Paris, Jonathan Allen, Ed Akiwumi and Kazuhiro Kawachi. The current PINC transcribers are: English: Karen Duval, Hindi Purvi Sharma, Japanese: Risa Hatayama, Spanish Patricia cisner, Turkish Baran Koksal. They have worked hard to produce accurate representations of the
Updated: June 17, 2002 |