LifeLUCID Corpus: Recordings of Speakers Aged 8 to 85 Years Engaged in Interactive Task in the Presence of Energetic and Informational Masking, 2017-2020

This speech corpus contains recordings for 104 monolingual native southern British English speakers aged between 8 and 85 years old while they engaged in a problem-solving picture-based ‘spot the difference’ task (Diapix) with a conversational partner in four listening conditions. In NORM (quiet, no masking), participants heard each other normally. In SPSN (speech-shaped noise), participants communicated in speech shaped noise at an approximate signal-to-noise ratio of 0 dB. In IMRE (informational masking related picture), they communicated while three voices in the background talked about the same picture. In IMUR (information masking unrelated picture), they communicated while three voices in the background talked about a different Diapix picture. Participants were recorded in sex and age band matched pairs; they were unfamiliar with one another. They were seated in separate sound-treated booths and communicated via headphones. One participant in the pair took the lead in the interaction and participants switched roles, each completing four conditions in each role. For each recording, there is a stereo audio file (.wav format) with each participant on a separate channel and two textgrid files, with time-aligned orthographic transcripts for each of the participants.