Developing a Korean Standard Speech DB

Abstract

The data accumulated in this database will be used to develop a speaker identification system. This may also be applied towards, but not limited to, fields of phonetic studies, sociolinguistics, and language pathology. We plan to supplement the large-scale speech corpus next year, in terms of research methodology and content, to better answer the needs of diverse fields. The purpose of this study is to develop a speech corpus for standard Korean speech. For the samples to viably represent the state of spoken Korean, demographic factors were considered to modulate a balanced spread of age, gender, and dialects. Nine separate regional dialects were categorized, and five age groups were established from individuals in their 20s to 60s. A speech-sample collection protocol was developed for the purpose of this study where each speaker performs five tasks: two reading tasks, two semi-spontaneous speech tasks, and one spontaneous speech task. This particular configuration of sample data collection accommodates gathering of rich and well-balanced speech-samples across various speech types, and is expected to improve the utility of the speech corpus developed in this study. Samples from 639 individuals were collected using the protocol. Speech samples were collected also from other sources, for a combined total of samples from 1,012 individuals.

The Potential Role of Talker Age in the Perception of Regional Accent

“…The sentence productions chosen for analysis consisted of a subset of recordings taken from the Korean Standard Speech DB database described in Shin, Jang, Kim, & Kim (2015). This database is composed of recordings from male and female speakers from six regions of Korea (Seoul/ Gyeonggi/Incheon, Gangwon, Chungcheong, Jeolla, Gyeongsang, and Jeju), from five age groups (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s+).…”

“…The database (Shin et al, 2015) contains, among other things, recordings of both read sentences and fill-in-the-blank read sentence productions. For the current study, we used two read sentences and one fill-in-the-blank sentence from each of 72 talkers: 12 male talkers from each of the 6 regions contained in the database, 3 with half of the talkers from each region in their 20s ("young"), and the other half in their 50s or 60s ("old").…”