This paper reports on a new database ― Polish rhythmic database and tools developed with the aim of investigating timing phenomena and rhythmic structure in Polish including topics such as, inter alia, the effect of speaking style and tempo on timing patterns, phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm and stability of rhythm metrics. So far, 19 native and 12 non-native speakers with different first languages have been recorded. The collected speech data (5 h 14 min.) represents five different speaking styles and five different tempi. For the needs of speech corpus management, annotation and analysis, a database was developed and integrated with Annotation Pro (Klessa et al., 2013, Klessa, 2016). Currently, the database is the only resource for Polish which allows for a systematic study of a broad range of phenomena related to speech timing and rhythm. The paper also introduces new tools and methods developed to facilitate the database annotation and analysis with respect to various timing and rhythm measures. In the end, the results of an ongoing research and first experimental results using the new resources are reported and future work is sketched.

The paper provides an overview of the Polish Speech Database for taking dictation of legal texts, created for the purpose of LVCSR system for Polish. It presents background information about the design of the database and the requirements coming from its future uses. The applied method of the text corpora construction is presented as well as the database structure and recording scenarios. The most important details on the recording conditions and equipment are specified, followed by the description of the assessment methodology of recording quality, and the annotation specification and evaluation. Additionally, the paper contains current statistics from the database and the information about both the ongoing and planned stages of the database development process.