Building a Non-native Speech Corpus Featuring Chinese-English Bilingual Children: Compilation and Rationale

Abstract: This paper introduces a non-native speech corpus consisting of narratives from fifty 5- to 6-year-old Chinese-English children. Transcripts totaling 6.5 hours of children taking a narrative comprehension test in English (L2) are presented, along with human-rated scores and annotations of grammatical and pronunciation errors. The children also completed the parallel MAIN tests in Chinese (L1) for reference purposes. For all tests we recorded audio and video with our innovative self-developed remote collection methods. The video recordings serve to mitigate the challenge of low intelligibility in L2 narratives produced by young children during the transcription process. This corpus offers valuable resources for second language teaching and has the potential to enhance the overall performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR).