spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers’ Age and Gender

Simon Devauchelle, David Doukhan, Remi Uro, Lucas Ondel, Valentin Pelloin, Olympia Imbert-Brégégère, Véronique Lefort, Kévin Picard, Emeline Seignobos, Albert Rilliard


Abstract
We present spINAch, a large diachronic corpus of French speech from radio and television archives, balanced by speakers’ gender, age (20-95 years old), and spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015. The dataset includes over 320 hours of recordings from more than two thousand speakers. The methodology for building the corpus is described, focusing on the quality of collected samples in acoustic terms. The data were automatically transcribed and phonetically aligned to allow studies at a phonemic level. More than 3 million oral vowels have been analyzed to propose their fundamental frequency and formants. The corpus, available to the community for research purposes, is valuable for describing the evolution of Parisian French through the representation of gender and age. The presented analyses also demonstrate that the diachronic nature of the corpus allows the observation of various phonetic phenomena, such as the evolution of voice pitch over time (which does not differ by gender in our data) and the neutralization of the /a/-/ɑ/ opposition in Parisian French during this period.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.459
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
5805–5820
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-459
DOI:
10.63317/58hgwvgvkz6g
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simon Devauchelle, David Doukhan, Remi Uro, Lucas Ondel, Valentin Pelloin, Olympia Imbert-Brégégère, Véronique Lefort, Kévin Picard, Emeline Seignobos, and Albert Rilliard. 2026. spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers’ Age and Gender. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5805–5820, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
spINAch: A Diachronic Corpus of French Broadcast Speech Controlled for Speakers’ Age and Gender (Devauchelle et al., LREC 2026)
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