THE HCRC MAP TASK CORPUS

This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants' maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.