Crosslinguistic corpus of hesitation phenomena: a corpus for investigating first and second language speech performance

There is a growing consensus that there is a need to evaluate second language speech performance with respect to first language speech behavior. To support this need, the Crosslinguistic Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena was developed. This freely available corpus is designed to investigate the crosslinguistic influence of speech patterns and consists of recordings of speakers producing first and second language speech samples in response to parallel elicitation tasks in each language. Preliminary results from the corpus are consistent with other findings that second language performance is sometimes correlated with first language speech behavior. In particular, findings show that silent pause rate and duration as well as other hesitation phenomena correlate with first language performance while speech rate does not. Interestingly, repeats also differ from first language production. Results show that the corpus may be a useful tool for researchers who wish to investigate the correspondence between first and second language speech, particularly with respect to the use of hesitation phenomena.