The LnNor Corpus: A spoken multilingual corpus of non-native and native Norwegian, English and Polish
- The corpus is available for download here.
- The LnNor corpus was collected in collaboration between the CLIMAD (Cross-linguistic influence in multilingualism across domains: phonology and syntax) and ADIM (Across-domain Investigations in Multilingualism: Modeling L3 Acquisition in Diverse Settings) projects, led by Prof. Magdalena Wrembel at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland and by Prof. Marit Westergaard at the Arctic University of Norway, from December 2021 to April 2024 with funding from the National Science Centre (NCN) in Poland and Norway Grants.
- The CLIMAD and ADIM projects explored cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition, processing, and use of a third language (L3/Ln) across various language domains and focused on different settings and stages of acquisition from a multilingual perspective. A range of sophisticated methodologies, such as perception and production tests, grammaticality judgement tasks and online brain imaging techniques like EEG, were leveraged to unravel the intricacies of multilingual processing. By capturing real-time insights into the interplay of cross-linguistic influences, the projects not only provided valuable contributions to the understanding of L3/Ln acquisition but also advanced theoretical frameworks in this field.
Corpus data collection covered a broad range of speech elicitation tasks. The recordings consist of word, sentence and text reading, picture story description, video story retelling, spontaneous speech and socio-phonetic interviews in Polish, English and Norwegian. The corpus contains metadata based on the Language History Questionnaire (Li et al. 2020) such as age, gender, native languages, proficiency level, length of language exposure, age of onset.
Data was collected from different groups of speakers:
- L1 Polish learners of Norwegian as L3/Ln, attending Scandinavian studies at Poznań College of Modern Languages and the University of Szczecin (instructed learners);
- L1 Polish learners of Norwegian as L3/Ln, living in Norway (naturalistic learners)
- L1 English natives as controls
- L1 Norwegian natives as controls
- speakers of L2/L3/Ln English and L2/L3/Ln Norwegian with various L1 backgrounds
Four types of speech tasks were recorded in Norwegian, English and Polish:
- word reading
- sentence reading
- text reading (“The North Wind and the Sun”)
- picture story telling
Metadata corresponding to the recordings include the following information:
- speaker ID, age, gender, education, city, region, country, speaker status, (instructed/naturalistic/mixed), native language, additional language spoken, proficiency levels, etc.
- recording ID
- language: PL (Polish), EN (English), NO (Norwegian)
- status: L1, L2, L3/Ln
- mode: TR1/2 (text reading), SR1/2 (sentence reading), WR (word reading), PD (picture description), ST (story telling), VT (video story telling)
- recording date, recording place, iteration, recording environment, recording device, type of microphone, noise level, etc.
The LnNor corpus has been created to represent multilingual speech with a focus on L3/Ln Norwegian learners as well as native controls of Norwegian, English and Polish. The corpus is designed to study linguistic variation in learners acquiring Norwegian as a foreign language in instructed and naturalistic settings. Additionally, a subcorpus of native speech patterns is provided to serve as a benchmark, against which the learners’ productions could be compared. Furthermore, our corpus contains word alignment with orthographic transcriptions of speech to facilitate subsequent analyses across various linguistic domains.
All speech samples were recorded with the use of Shure SM-35 unidirectional cardioid head-worn condenser microphones, using portable Marantz PMD620 solid state recorders with signal digitized at 48 kHz, 16-bit. This set-up was selected to minimize ambient noise and provide clear and focused recordings.
The LnNOR corpus (part 1: 2021-2022 recordings) consists of 475 annotated files from 116 speakers. The speakers included 90 L1 Polish, 17 L1 Norwegian and 9 L1 English speakers. The total recording time is approximately 38 hours.
The recordings in the released LnNor corpus cover files collected between 2021-2022.
