---
license: cc-by-nc-sa-2.0
task_categories:
- automatic-speech-recognition
tags:
- phone-recognition
- l2-speech
pretty_name: GMU Speech Accent Archive
language:
- en
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: data/test-*
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: id
    dtype: string
  - name: audio
    dtype: audio
  - name: transcript
    dtype: string
  splits:
  - name: test
    num_bytes: 3121706755
    num_examples: 1242
  download_size: 3064680707
  dataset_size: 3121706755
---

# Speech Accent Archive

> [!NOTE]
> This work is licensed under [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).
> If you use this dataset, please remember to cite:
> ```
> @article{gmuspeechaccentarchive,
>     title={Speech Accent Archive},
>     author={Weinberger, Steven},
>     year={2015},
>     publisher={George Mason University},
>     note={Retrieved from \url{https://accent.gmu.edu}}
> }
> ```

[Speech Accent Archive]((https://accent.gmu.edu/about.php)) is a dataset containing 1000+ utterances from speakers of diverse background.
Every speaker read the same short paragraph, and then the speech is transcribed phonetically:

> Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas,
> five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.
> She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.


The [official website](https://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php) provides interactive search of additional speaker information, 
while we only include paired speech and phonetic transcription here. 
(Original files could be obtained via contacting [accent@gmu.edu](mailto:accent@gmu.edu).)
The utterance ID is kept the same, and transcripts are extracted from the RTF files.
Note that the speech is sampled at 44.1kHz!


This dataset is included as `pr-saa` in our phone recognition benchmarking toolkit, [💎PRiSM](https://github.com/changelinglab/prism).

```
@misc{prism2026,
      title={PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models}, 
      author={Shikhar Bharadwaj and Chin-Jou Li and Yoonjae Kim and Kwanghee Choi and Eunjung Yeo and Ryan Soh-Eun Shim and Hanyu Zhou and Brendon Boldt and Karen Rosero Jacome and Kalvin Chang and Darsh Agrawal and Keer Xu and Chao-Han Huck Yang and Jian Zhu and Shinji Watanabe and David R. Mortensen},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2601.14046},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14046}, 
}
```