LDC Telephone Speech Collection Project

The Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu) needs participants for FISHER, a new telephone speech study to be conducted in the Early Winter 2002-2003. FISHER is open to all speakers of English, native and non-native. In contrast to prior US regional studies (Switchboard), FISHER is a national (North America) study. The FISHER project will be undertaken to support linguistic research, technology development and education. All calls will be recorded for these purposes. Participant Identities will be kept strictly confidential and not released with the data. FISHER participants will take part in 1 to 3 telephone calls talking to other participants on suggested topics for ten minutes. FISHER topics can be found at the URL below: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/EARS/Fisher/topics.html A robot operator will initiate all calls. Participants need only answer their phones at the time they specify during the registration process. Participants will be compensated $10 per call. In addition, for each call made, participants will be eligible for 1 chance at (3) $1000.00 lottery prizes. This study is open to anyone in the US. You need not be a US citizen to participate. You need only have the ability to answer a phone in the US. If you know of anyone who might be interested in contributing their voice to LDC research, we would also be appreciative if you could make them aware of this opportunity. To register for this study please see the following page: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/EARS/Fisher/intro.html or call 1 800 380 PENN, to register and for more information.