SpiCE: Speech in Cantonese and English

This is the Speech in Cantonese and English (SpiCE) corpus. SpiCE is an audio corpus of conversational Cantonese-English bilingual speech recorded in Vancouver, Canada during 2018-2020. The corpus includes high-quality recordings of 34 early bilinguals in both English and Cantonese. Participants completed a sentence reading task, storyboard narration, and conversational interview in each language. These different speech tasks are available in a single audio file for each language for each talker. A Praat textgrid file accompanies each audio file. The textgrids provide hand-corrected orthographic transcription and phoneme-level forced-alignment in Cantonese and English. As an open-access language resource, SpiCE will promote bilingualism research for a typologically distinct pair of languages, of which Cantonese remains understudied despite there being millions of speakers around the world. The SpiCE corpus is especially well-suited for phonetic research on conversational speech, and enables researchers to study cross-language within-speaker phenomena for a diverse group of early Cantonese-English bilinguals. These are areas with few existing high-quality resources. Corpus documentation is available at: https://spice-corpus.readthedocs.io/.