As part of the recording process in the CORAAL:DCB (Washington DC 2016) component, most participants read the "Please Call Stella" reading passage from the Speech Accent Archive (Steven H. Weinberger at George Mason University):
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
The Supplement contains 21 minutes of total speech. The passage is short, on average 28 seconds in length per speaker, but contains a range of English sounds and sound sequences in a controlled task and can be useful in evaluating stylistic differences in comparison to the conversational speech contained in CORAAL:DCB, which is from the same speakers.
The Stella passages were transcribed in Praat by Chloe Tacata and Charlie Farrington. Orthographic transcripts are available as Praat TextGrids (.TextGrid), ELAN files (.eaf), and plain, tab-delimited text (.txt). In addition, the DCB Stella Passage also includes phone-level aligned Praat TextGrids (via the Montreal Forced Aligner; McAuliffe et al. 2017). We also include the FAVE-Extract (Rosenfelder et al. 2022) vowel measurements. All files were prepared for upload by Charlie Farrington.
Metadata for the speakers of the DCB Stella Passage are available on the CORAAL Download Site (http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/coraal/).
Audio (.WAV files): http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/coraal/supplements/DCB-stella_audio.tar.gz (112 mb)
Annotations: http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/coraal/supplements/DCB-stella_annotations.tar.gz (4 mb)
The DCB Stella Passage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (4.0) International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). It is available for free and is downloadable from the above link. It is also available as part of CORAAL's Commercial Licenses.
Citation
If you use these recordings, we ask that you cite the following:
Farrington, Charlie, Minnie Quartey, Chloe Tacata, and Tyler Kendall. 2023. CORAAL:DCB Stella Passage (Washington DC 2016). Version 2023.03. A Supplement to the Corpus of Regional African American Language. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://oraal.uoregon.edu/coraal/supplements/dcb-stella].
Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2020. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://doi.org/10.7264/1ad5-6t35].
