Phonetic aspects of content design in AESOP (Asian English Speech cOrpus Project)

This research is part of the ongoing multinational collaboration ldquoAsian English speech corpus projectrdquo (AESOP), whose aim is to build up an Asian English speech corpus representing the varieties of English spoken in Asia. AESOP is an international consortium of linguists, speech scientists, psychologists and educators from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Indonesia and Mongolia. Its primary aim is to collect and compare Asian English speech corpora from the countries listed above in order to derive a set of core properties common to all varieties of Asian English, as well as to discover features that are particular to individual varieties. Each research team will use a common recording setup and share an experimental task set, and will develop a common, open-ended annotation system. Moreover, AESOP-collected corpora will be an open resource, available to the research community at large. The initial stage of the phonetics aspect of this project will be devoted to designing spoken-language tasks which will elicit production of a large range of English segmental and suprasegmental characteristics. These data will be used to generate a catalogue of acoustic characteristics particular to individual varieties of Asian English, which will then be compared with the data collected by other AESOP members in order to determine areas of overlap between L1 and L2 English as well as differences among varieties of Asian English.