Article ID: e25.06
This paper presents the current design of the J-AESOP corpus, a learner speech corpus featuring Japanese speakers’ English. It has been developed as part of the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project (AESOP), an international and multi-institutional project to construct a collection of Asian English speech databases. While the recording procedures and speech materials are standardized in the AESOP project, the J-AESOP corpus incorporates additional features not found in other AESOP corpora, such as data from native English speakers, Japanese reading materials (Japanese version of “The North Wind and the Sun”), manual correction of automatic forced alignment, and perceptual ratings of accentedness/nativelikeness and comprehensibility. These unique features allow an in-depth investigation of Japanese-English bilingual speech, as exemplified by our exploratory investigation of the production of voiceless coronal fricatives in Japanese (i.e., [s, ɕ]) and English (i.e., /s, ʃ, θ/) reported in this paper. The paper also discusses directions for further development of the corpus, including improvements in data availability.
