“Casselberveetovallarga” and other Unpronounceable Places: The CrossTowns Corpus

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus of non-native speech that contains pronunciation variants of European city names from fivecountries spoken by speakers of four native languages. It was originally designed as a research tool for the study ofpronunciation errors by non-native speakers in the pronunciation of foreign city names. The corpus has now been released. Followinga brief sketch of the research context in which this data collection was established, the first part of this paper describes the contents and technical specifications of the corpus (design, speakers, language material, recording conditions).Compared to corpora of native speech, non-native speech compilations raise a number of additional difficulties that requirespecific attention and methodology. Therefore, the second part of the paper aims to point out some of these general issuesfrom the perspective of the experience gained in our research. Strategies to deal with these difficulties will be exploredalong with their specific benefits and shortfalls, concluding that non-native speech corpora require a number of specificdesign guidelines which are often difficult to put into practice.

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