The Atlanta Motor Speech Disorders Corpus: Motivation, Development, and Utility

This paper describes the design and collection of a comprehensive spoken language dataset from speakers with motor speech disorders in Atlanta, Ga., USA. This collaborative project aimed to gather a spoken database consisting of nonmainstream American English speakers residing in the Southeastern US in order to provide a more diverse perspective of motor speech disorders.

Ninety-nine adults with an acquired neurogenic disorder resulting in a motor speech disorder were recruited. Stimuli include isolated vowels, single words, sentences with contrastive focus, sentences with emotional content and prosody, sentences with acoustic and perceptual sensitivity to motor speech disorders, as well as 'The Caterpillar' and 'The Grandfather' passages.

Utility of this data in understanding the potential interplay of dialect and dysarthria was demonstrated with a subset of the speech samples existing in the database.

The Atlanta Motor Speech Disorders Corpus will enrich our understanding of motor speech disorders through the examination of speech from a diverse group of speakers.