Collecting and Analyzing Spontaneous Speech Data

Abstract

Spontaneous speech samples can serve several purposes within a language acquisition study. First, spontaneous speech can be used in various ways to assess the proficiency of individuals, for example via accent ratings, measures of lexical variability, and frequency of different types of errors. It can also be an object of analysis in its own right, for example in examining interactions between linguistic variables and potential trade-off effects, including factors such as the use of fixed expressions, sentence complexity or speech rate as well as the interaction between them. Finally, it can provide a comparison of production with processing or comprehension measures. While the analysis of this sort of data is not, in principle, different for a large scale study like this than for a single dedicated study, the versatility of information it allows the researcher to assess is easy to underestimate. This chapter will discuss the collection, transcription, coding and analysis of spontaneous speech samples, serving as an exploration and reminder of some of those possibilities as well as an introduction to how to make use of them.