Archive of Stuttered Speech
(UCLASS)
Funded by The Wellcome Trust
This site allows visitors to access
recordings of speakers who stutter and background details about these
speakers and the conditions in which the recordings were made. The recordings
are available in various formats. The main two sets of recordings were made
in normal speaking conditions and the final one was made when the sound of
the speaker’s voice was altered as he or she spoke. The three data sets
are called UCLASS Release One, UCLASS Release Two and UCLASS-FSF. |
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Information available for UCLASS
Releases One and Two and UCLASS-FSF On entering the UCLASS Release One and
Two data pages, you can access information about the files available and some
ancillary information about the speakers, the audio data and transcriptions
by following the links. The access file can be downloaded, but
does not display for security reasons.
UCLASS-FSF contains audio data only from an experiment on speaking in
altered listening conditions reported in Howell, P., Davis, S., Bartrip, J. & Wormald, L.
(2004). |
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Audio data The audio data have been prepared so
that they can be downloaded and played on a PC fitted with a sound card (WAV
and MP3 formats) or so they can be handled and analyzed by freeware available
on the web (note that MP3 format is compressed to 32 kilobits per second).
The three freeware packages are CHILDES, PRAAT
and SFS (access these sites
to download the software and to read the user manuals by clicking on the
appropriate name). |
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Transcription
data (available for some files in UCLASS Release One and Two) For CHILDES. Transcriptions were
prepared using an in-house script which gives a CHAT file (MacWhinney, 1995)
and the corresponding audio files are also available in WAV format. The WAV
files have been linked to the CHAT files. The analysis software, CLAN, has
options that allow PRAAT programs to process the associated WAV files. Other
information that CHAT files include in their headers is available in the
ACCESS files described above for Releases One and Two. CHAT
files + WAV = CHILDES For PRAAT. The transcriptions have been converted to
PRAAT TextGrids. PRAAT provides acoustic analysis facilities for dealing with
WAV files that are also available in the directory. TextGrids
+ WAV = PRAAT For SFS.
SFS stands for Speech Filing System and, as its name suggests, it
files sources of information together (e.g. audio and transcriptional). There
is a wide range of utilities available in SFS. For instance, the audio
waveforms and aligned transcriptions can be displayed and manipulated using
some of the SFS utilities. There is an SFS file corresponding to each of the
recordings. Most of these just contain the audio file. Some of the remaining
ones have phonetic transcriptions that have been aligned manually against the
audio file. Separate orthographic and phonetic transcriptions are available
for some of the files as text files. The phonetic transcriptions are in JSRU
format (see “How we transcribe” under shared resources on the
main page of this site). It is straightforward to translate these to other
phonetic formats. The
data and software are freely available to anyone for research and teaching
purposes subject to the conditions that they a) acknowledge the source of the
data, b) indicate that data collection was supported by the Wellcome Trust. Data
Download Pages Data Download Page for UCLASS Release One Data Download Page for UCLASS Release Two Data Download Page for UCLASS-FSF |
References Howell, P., Davis, S., Bartrip, J. & Wormald, L.
(2004). Effectiveness of frequency shifted feedback at reducing
disfluency for linguistically easy, and difficult, sections of speech
(original audio recordings included). Stammering Research, 1, 309-315. MacWhinney, B. (1995). The CHILDES project. Hillsdale NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum. |
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