CorAIt – A non-native speech database for Italian

CorAIt is a non-native speech database for Italian, which is freely accessible online for academic research purposes. It was especially designed to meet the requirements of a larger research project focused on foreign accented Italian speech. The corpus is aimed at providing a uniform collection of speech samples uttered by non-native speakers of Italian. To date, 105 non-native speakers – whose mother tongues are either French, Romanian, Spanish, English, German, or Russian – have been recorded. The corpus includes also a control group made up of 16 Italian speakers. There are almost 8 hours of audio material, both read speech (first and second reading), and spontaneous speech. This paper emphasizes the necessity for this type of database, it describes the steps involved in its construction, and it presents the features of CorAIt.