Multi-party Conversational Corpus of L1 and L2 for Speech Alignment Research (Teams-SK): Methodological Approach

Abstract

The tendency for speakers to align or accommodate their verbal and non-verbal behaviour to their interlocutors is a fundamental mechanism in spoken interaction, strongly associated with successful communication and social bonding. Despite its ubiquity and documentation across various modalities and linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, prosodic), a lack of comparable, multi-layered linguistic resources and methodological agreement prevents a deeper understanding of its cognitive mechanisms. Multidimensional view of speech alignment might enhance its application in areas like language training or human-machine interaction. This paper addresses these gaps by presenting the development of a multilingual corpus of L1 Slovak and L2 English speech, extending a comparable corpus in L1 English. The corpus utilizes a modified cooperative board game, Forbidden Island, to elicit semi-spontaneous, multi-party conversation and introduces a complementary pair game to specifically target and prime syntactic alignment. The resource includes psychological metadata (e.g., personality, anxiety, perceived dominance) and enables a reproducible methodology for investigating the relationship between entrainment patterns and individual characteristics. By providing a non-Germanic language perspective and a direct L1–L2 comparison framework at prosodic, lexical, pragmatic and syntactic levels, this corpus offers a rich resource for advancing the theoretical understanding, replication, and practical application of speech alignment.

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