Note on Accent Diagnostic Materials, HCRC Map Task The accent diagnostic materials recorded by all Map Task talkers were taken from Barry et al. (1989). They approach the problem of inter-speaker variability in automatic speech recognition by exploiting systematic vowel differences. In the first stage of a two-stage adaptation process one of four gross regional English accents is selected by an accent identification procedure. The selection is based on vowel quality differences within four calibration sentences. The remainder of this note summarises section 2.1 of Barry et al. (1989), in which they describe the calibration sentences and their motivation. The four calibration sentences offer clear differentiation of the following four gross regional accents of English: North American (NA) Northern English (NE) Scottish (SC) Southern English (SE) The sentences given by Barry et al. and recorded by the Map Task talkers are: 1. After tea father fed the cat. 2. Father hid that awful cart at the top of the park. 3. Father cooked two of the puddings in butter. 4. Father bought a lot of cloth. Contained within the sentences are several examples of vowel classes which have differing phonemic status within the four regional accents. The relevent vowel oppositions are listed below, where the lexical types used to represent the vowel classes are as given in Wells (1982). Table 1 Vowel comparisons for regional accent separation (+ distinction - no distinction) Lexical types SE NE SC NA Lexical tokens TRAP-BATH + - - - cat-after FOOT-STRUT + - + + pudding-butter FOOT-GOOSE + + - + pudding-two LOT-CLOTH - - - + lot-cloth LOT-THOUGHT + + - + lot-bought CLOTH-THOUGHT + + - - cloth-bought LOT-PALM + + + - lot-father START-PALM - - + + cart/park-father References Barry,W.J., Hoequist,C.E., and Nolan,F.J. (1989) An approach to the problem of regional accent in automatic speech recognition. Computer Speech and Language, 3, 355-366. Academic Press, London. Wells,J.C. (1982) Accents of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.