Language disturbances can be a diagnostic marker for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, at earlier stages. Connected speech analysis provides a non-invasive and easy-to-assess measure for determining aspects of the severity of language impairment. In this paper we focus on the development of a new corpus consisting of audio recordings of picture descriptions (including transcriptions) of the Cookie-theft, produced by Swedish speakers. The speech elicitation procedure provides an established method of obtaining highly constrained samples of connected speech that can allow us to study the intricate interactions between various linguistic levels and cognition. We chose the Cookie-theft picture since it’s a standardized test that has been used in various studies in the past, and therefore comparisons can be made based on previous research. This type of picture description task might be useful for detecting subtle language deficits in patients with subjective and mild cognitive impairment. The resulting corpus is a new, rich and multi-faceted resource for the investigation of linguistic characteristics of connected speech and a unique dataset that provides a rich resource for (future) research and experimentation in many areas, and of language impairment in particular. The information in the corpus can also be combined and correlated with other collected data about the speakers, such as neuropsychological tests, brain physiology and cerebrospinal fluid markers as well as imaging.
@InProceedings{KOKKINAKIS18.307, author = {Dimitrios Kokkinakis and Kristina Lundholm Fors and Kathleen Fraser and Arto Nordlund}, title = "{A Swedish Cookie-Theft Corpus}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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