VocES – An Open Database of Child and Youth Vowels in Spanish for Research Purposes

Several corpora and multimedia databases have been developed for research purposes. Some involve numbers, emotional speeches, or recordings of spontaneous or acted conversations with volunteers or professional speakers. Other speech databases have been created with children with normal speech or speech with language disorders for rehabilitation purposes or linguistic studies. However, it is not common to find databases in Spanish that contain vowels pronounced by children or young people. On the other hand, information about speakers such as their age or height is also difficult to find. This information is relevant in studies where the correlation between anthropometric data and other types of variables is needed. To meet this need, we created VocES, a database of child and youth vowels in Spanish for research purposes. This article describes the technical aspects of the obtained database and relates some research applications. VocES contains 1,665 recordings of the five vowels of Spanish from subjects aged 3 to 18, and also includes information on the age, height, and gender of the speakers.