The Use and Utility of Localised Speech Forms in Determining Identity Corpus - Vowel Formant Frequency Data, 2016-2019

The data deposited are taken from fieldwork recordings undertaken with speakers from the three fieldwork sites, Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough in the Northeast of England. From each locality, 40 informants were recorded, giving a total of 120 informants. The key data in the file All_formants_July_2018.xlsx are vowel formant frequency measurements, in Hertz, for the peripheral monophthongs denoted by the lexical set keywords FLEECE, TRAP, START/PALM, BATH, DRESS, and NORTH/FORCE (after Wells 1982). In the varieties of English represented in the TUULS corpus, SQUARE is often a monophthong (represented here by [e:]) rather than an ingliding diphthong. We have also included formant measurements for the relevant vowels of the commA and lettER sets, plus tokens of schwa which are not exemplars of commA or lettER. This file is the master file containing the aggregated data for 120 individual participants (denoted P then participant number). There are 16,390 rows in the spreadsheet. The data are comprised of metadata about the participant and the group to which s/he belongs, the software settings, and characteristics of the recording from which each observation was drawn. We also include data taken from a subsample of 60 male speakers from the TUULS corpus. The data in the file IJSLLheatmapdatawithspeakers.csv are ‘speaker scores’ for the 60 male speakers from the TUULS corpus, and 100 male speakers from the DyViS (Dynamic Variability in Speech) corpus (Nolan, McDougall, de Jong & Hudson 2009). A speaker score is a measure of the difference between a pair of statistical models each representing the resonance characteristics of an individual speaker’s voice. The first 100 rows in the spreadsheet represent the DyViS speakers, who are labelled 001’ to 121’, as there are gaps in the sequence of number labels. The second block of 60 rows contains the data for the TUULS speakers (labelled using a ‘P’ prefix followed by a number). The columns are arranged according to the same sequence.