Oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome exhibit special characteristics that have been the target of study for decades. In spite of this attention, the availability of rich resources for its analysis is still scarce.
In this paper, we present the definition and compiling procedure of a corpus of semi-controlled oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome that aims to allow the analysis of how speakers with Down syndrome produce functional and linguistic aspects of speech.
The corpus has been recorded while speakers with Down syndrome use a video game for training oral competences.
Utterances are related to well defined communicative tasks recorded by both speakers with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers. We present the procedure for human experts to evaluate the recordings and the transcription criteria followed for enriching the utterances of the corpus.
Although the activities of the video game mainly focus on prosody and pragmatics, we show the corpus permits the analysis of the clear contrast in voice and speech between individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers, taking into account the high heterogeneity of the speech problems characteristic of the syndrome.
This material allows the analysis of the speech problems characteristic of the syndrome with applications to the generation of knowledge of the particular problem of these speakers that could be used in future works for therapists to prepare specific training or enriching diagnosis regarding possible speech and language disorders.
The corpus can be downloaded here