Green Grass Park (Tamil) - A SESAME Research Tool

In the domain of speech elicitation, it is well understood that participants speak differently when producing different kinds of speech. In particular, 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 version of the task has been created for the Singaporean variety of Tamil. It was designed to elicit contrasts in the coronal nasals (dental/alveolar/retroflex), stops (alveolar/retroflex), rhotics (tap/trill/retroflex approximant) and laterals (alveolar/retroflex). Illustrations by Seraphina Fong in collaboration with author team