Method, recordings, and file format

Electropalatography (EPG) is an artuculatory research tool that tracks the contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth over time, providing spatial and temporal information about consonant and vowel articulations. For more information on the method, please see Kochetov (2020).

The EPG recordings were made using the WinEPG system (Wrench et al. 2002) at a sampling rate of 100 Hz. The audio (at 22050 Hz) was recorded using an Audiotechnica cardioid microphone connected via a pre‑amp to the WinEPG system, which automatically synchronizes the audio and EPG streams using an internal beep. See Colantoni et al. (2024) for details.

For the database, video files (.avi and .mp4) and audio files (.wav and .mp3) were created for each utterance using the Articulate Assistant software (Wrench et al. 2002), which is the primary tool for EPG data analysis. The videos were made both at a normal speed and slowed down (x4), which allows to preserve the original frame rate of the EPG Articulatory Assistant files. The latter videos are recommended to be used for a closer examination of the data in the database.

References

• Colantoni, L., Kochetov, A. and Steele, J. (2023). Articulatory insights into the L2 acquisition of English-/l/ allophony. Language and Speech. 33 pp. link
• Kochetov, A. (2020). Research methods in articulatory phonetics I: Introduction and studying oral gestures. Language and Linguistics Compass, 14(4), 1-1. link
• Wrench, A. A., Gibbon, F., McNeill, A. M., and Wood, S. (2002). An EPG therapy protocol for remediation and assessment of articulation disorders. In J. H. L. Hansen & B. Pellom (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th international conference on spoken language processing (pp. 965–968). ICSLP.