The C-ORAL-ESQ project: a corpus for the study of spontaneous speech of individuals with schizophrenia

This paper presents the C-ORAL-ESQ corpus project, which is dedicated to the study of the speech of individuals with schizophrenia. The main aim of the project is to investigate cognitive aspects of individuals with schizophrenia. This investigation is carried through the compilation of a spontaneous speech corpus and its study, which focuses mainly on the analysis of information structuring and its prosodic correlates. The paper mainly deals with the methodological aspects of the corpus compilation and reports its present stage: it informs about the environment and the setting of the sound file recordings, the medical and ethical criteria for the selection of the participants, the corpus aimed dimensions and the present stage of compilation, as well as its design and compilation criteria, which include attention to prosodic annotation, and metadata related to the participants’ characteristics. Additionally, the theory adopted for the study of information structure is summarized, focusing on those aspects that can better address cognitive processes of individuals with schizophrenia and their prosodic correlates. Finally, the perspectives for future studies and resource compilations are presented.