Description

This multimodal corpus is a collection of video and speech recordings of face-to-face dialogues of Russian immigrants aged from 20-30 years old. At the moment 7 dialogue conversations of 40-60 minutes were recorded at the University of Cologne in November 2022, in total ca 4,5 hours of speech. The participants were native Russian speakers who live in Germany no longer than 5 years. Mostly pairs of not acquainted participants were selected, except one dyad (they were a married couple at the time of recordings). The participants were allowed to talk about any topic they wanted. The language material was captured in optimal conditions using frontal view HD camera with green background.

This corpus contains data from 10 participants. All of them were university students. The video recordings will be accompanied with ELAN transcriptions and gesture annotations with a focus on discourse organization and conversational interaction and with particular attention to manual and nonmanual gestures (such as head nods, head shake, eye gaze, eye blinks, mouth gesture, nose wrinkles, face expressions, eyebrow and lip movement).

The data has been elicited for the purposes of conducting the project "Gestures or Signs? Comparing Manual and Non-manual Constructions Sharing the Same Form in Co-speech Gesture and Sign Language: A Corpus-driven Approach" funded by DFG under the priority programme ViCom. As the project is aimed at comparing constructions of bodily movements that take the same form in languages belonging to different modalities, the annotations focus on alignments between speech and (non)manual gesture.