For example, here is a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi man:
IRAQI MAN: “Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store.”
And here is a twenty-three-year-old woman from Eritrea:
ERITREAN WOMAN: “Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.”
Some people think the archive would be better if it included natural speech -- people talking freely, not just reading the same words. Professor Weinberger recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of his site.
STEVEN WEINBERGER: “The biggest plus, of course, is that it is so uniform that you can immediately compare a Kiswahili speaker to a native English speaker. But the downside is that a less-than-skilled reader will have difficulties with the paragraph that might not demonstrate their true phonetic abilities.”
People often use sounds from their first language until they can reproduce the ones used in the language they are learning.
Professor Weinberger says the site gets a million visits a month.
STEVEN WEINBERGER: “We get notices from speech pathologists, from computational engineers who do speech processing, from PhD students who want to do research on bias and accent judgments, from actors who need to learn a special part."
The archive contains more than one thousand five hundred recordings. These can be searched many ways, including by place of birth and the age at which the speaker began to learn English.
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2013-11-25
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