MELI: Mandarin-English Bilingual Speech Interviews from Vancouver, 2024

Recorded in 2024 in Vancouver, Canada, the Mandarin–English Language Interview (MELI) corpus contains approximately 30 hours of audio from 51 bilingual speakers. The corpus includes sociolinguistic interviews and reading tasks in both languages, with high-quality recordings and Praat TextGrid files providing orthographic transcriptions and alignments. Created by Suyuan Liu, this open-access resource is hosted on the Borealis Harvested Dataverse platform.

Use Cases

• Analyzing bilingual code-switching patterns based on utterance-level transcriptions.
• Studying acoustic features of Mandarin and English speech from aligned segment-level data.
• Investigating the relationship between language background and speech production using the provided participant metadata.
• Examining spatial language and cognition through the digitized maps from the draw-a-map activity.

Strengths

• Approximately 30 hours of high-quality audio recordings from 51 speakers.
• Includes multi-level annotations (utterance, word, segment) in Praat TextGrid files.
• Contains supplementary materials like digitized maps, language background data, and OOV item lists.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file formats are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Borealis Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

Sociolinguistic interviews and reading tasks recorded from bilingual speakers.

Time Range

2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-25 04:11:19; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Vancouver, Canada