Acoustic analysis in the Accents of Non-Native English (ANNE) corpus

When assessing a second language speaker’s nativelikeness or accentedness, researchers often employ holistic judgments (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam 2009, Ioup et al. 1994) or auditory analysis of specific segments (Rampton 2013). Acoustic analysis, which can help quantify minute details, can be quite time-consuming when large corpora are involved. This research note describes the Accents of Non-Native English (ANNE) learner corpus which employs the open-source Language Brain and Behaviour-Corpus Annotation Tool (LaBB-CAT; Fromont & Hay 2012) that allows researchers to automatically extract timing information about segments in the corpus and process them with Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2009), facilitating large-scale acoustic analysis.