In the domain of speech elicitation, speakers tend to use more ‘standard’ pronunciations when reading individual words in isolation, as compared to reading words within the context of a sentence, or talking freely off-the-cuff (Labov, 1966). When speakers have a complex task to achieve (e.g., describing everything they can see in a complex picture), speakers typically monitor their speech less, and default to more informal speech styles. We designed a picture description task called Green Grass Park to elicit a small sample of naturalistic speech. Along with other SESAME Research Tools, the Green Grass Park task was designed with multilingualism in mind.
This repository contains documentation for the full set of pictures developed in the BLIP Lab in 2019-2020, and downloadable tools designed for the languages of Singapore: Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. This archive contains the following:
Documentation of the Research Tool (Pan, Fong & Styles, 2020)
• Design notes, word lists, age of acquisition estimates in all languages, and lexical frequencies (where available)
• Example instructions
Mandarin Chinese version of the task (Pan, Fong & Styles, 2020)
• Designed to elicit /y/ and a sibilant contrast
Malay version of the task (Pan, Fong, Sundaray, Salleh, Binte Amran & Styles, 2020)
• Designed to elicit a coronal nasal contrast (alveolar/palatal) and a targeted vowel contrasts (a/e/schwa)
Tamil version of the task (Pan, Fong, Sundaray, Yogarrajah & Styles, 2020)
• Designed to elicit contrasts in the coronal nasals (dental, alveolar, retroflex), stops (dental/retroflex), rhotics (tap/trill/retroflex approximant) and laterals (alveolar/retroflex)
Split-Language version (Styles, Fong, Pan Woon, Chua, 2023)
• Designed to elicit code mixing. Three bilingual versions of the task where half of the labels are provided in each language (Mandarin/English; Malay/English; Tamil/English)
English version (Woon & Styles, in prep)
• Designed to elicit informal words and target sounds in the Singapore variety of English
Wordless Pictures (Fong, binte Amran & Styles, in prep)
• Alternative versions of each task with no labels, for adaptation into any language