Data in Brief (Jun 2022)

The LaMIT database: A read speech corpus for acoustic studies of the Italian language toward lexical access based on the detection of landmarks and other acoustic cues to features

  • Maria-Gabriella Di Benedetto,
  • Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,
  • Jeung-Yoon Choi,
  • Luca De Nardis,
  • Javier Arango,
  • Ian Chan,
  • Alec DeCaprio,
  • Sara Budoni

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 42
p. 108275

Abstract

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The LaMIT database consists in recordings of 100 Italian sentences. The sentences in the database were designed so to include all phonemes of the Italian language, and also take into account the typical frequency of each phoneme in written Italian. Four native adult speakers of Standard Italian, raised and living in Rome, Italy, two female and two male, pronounced the sentences in two different recording sessions; two repetitions for each sentence per speaker were therefore collected, for a total of 800 recordings.The database was specifically created for application in the LaMIT project, that focuses on the application to the Italian language of the Lexical Access model proposed by Ken Stevens for American English. The model relies on the detection of specific acoustic discontinuities called landmarks and other acoustic cues to features that characterize each phoneme. Each recording was thus processed to generate a set of labeling files that identify both predicted landmarks and other cues, and actual landmarks/cues. The labeling files, compiled according to the labeling syntax used in the Praat speech processing software, are also made available as part of the LAMIT database.

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