ART: The Alternating Reading Task Corpus for Speech Entrainment and Imitation

TL;DR

The ART Corpus provides a controlled dataset of dyadic speech tasks across multiple languages and accents, enabling systematic study of speech entrainment and imitation behaviors in communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, multi-condition speech corpus with detailed annotations and diverse linguistic and demographic data for studying speech entrainment.

Findings

Includes data from French, Italian, and Slovak-accented English.

Contains detailed transcriptions, proficiency scores, and questionnaires.

Facilitates controlled experiments on speech imitation and entrainment.

Abstract

We introduce the Alternating Reading Task (ART) Corpus, a collection of dyadic sentence reading for studying the entrainment and imitation behaviour in speech communication. The ART corpus features three experimental conditions - solo reading, alternating reading, and deliberate imitation - as well as three sub-corpora encompassing French-, Italian-, and Slovak-accented English. This design allows systematic investigation of speech entrainment in a controlled and less-spontaneous setting. Alongside detailed transcriptions, it includes English proficiency scores, demographics, and in-experiment questionnaires for probing linguistic, personal and interpersonal influences on entrainment. Our presentation covers its design, collection, annotation processes, initial analysis, and future research prospects.