Dialogic ItAlian (DIA): the creation of a corpus of Italian spontaneous speech

In recent decades, the interest in speech sciences for casual conversations has increased, and researchers have begun to investigate the characteristics of spontaneous and casual speech in different languages, such as German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Czech. These types of investigations are based on novel spontaneous speech corpora that allow the systematic research on large amounts of data and contribute to understand the empirical dimension of phonological competence. In this paper we present a new speech corpus of spontaneous Italian based on dialogic interactions (DIA - Dialogic ItAlian), representing the language variety spoken by both native and non-native speakers in a bilingual community. After discussing some of the methodological and theoretical issues concerning the role of speech corpora in the study of language variation, we illustrate how the corpus was created, from data collection to the construction of a database. We then offer an exploratory investigation on some indicators of spontaneity.