WIRED - West Yorkshire regional English database 2016-2019

The West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED) consists of approximately 200 hours of high-quality audio recordings of 180 West Yorkshire (British English) speakers. All participants are male between the ages of 18-30, and are divided evenly (60 per region) across three boroughs within West Yorkshire (Northern England): Bradford, Kirklees, and Wakefield. Speakers participated in four spontaneous speaking tasks. The first two tasks relate to a mock crime where the participant speaks to a police officer (Research Assistant 1) followed by an accomplice (Research Assistant 2). Speakers returned a minimum of 6 days later at which point they were paired with someone from their borough and recorded having a conversation on any topics they wish. The final task is an experimental task in which speakers are asked to leave a voicemail message related to the fictitious crime from the first recording session. In total, each speaker participated in approximately 1 hour of spontaneous speech recordings. The primary motivation for the construction of the West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED) was to provide a collection of regionally stratified speech recordings (by boroughs) from within a single, politically defined region (a county). The corpus aims to facilitate research on methodological issues surrounding the delimitation of the reference population when considering the typicality of a speech sample for a given forensic speaker comparison case, while also providing valuable insight into the West Yorkshire accent(s).