Phonetic Database (PDB)

STRhas collaborated with KayPENTAX, and the University of Victoria on the design, reproduction and distribution of a phonetic database consisting of digitized speech samples from 57 world languages on CD-ROM. For other large corpora database information contact the Linguistic Data Consortium.

The PDB CD-ROM is supported by documentation in hardcopy form, containing the phonetic inventory of each language, and the transcriptions and orthography of each digitized speech sample. The purpose of the PDB is to depict and compare the sounds, symbols and conventions of transcription used by these languages.

The items presented are intended to illustrate the extent of phonological contrast in the language, to represent a wide range of phonetic realizations and to give examples of running speech. PDB speech samples can be accessed using the CSL program.

For customers who do not own CSL, PDB speech samples can be accessed using STR's SpeakNSP™ program, which uses a standard multimedia card to provide audio output.