Dear Auditory List Community Members,
If you use narrative speech in your studies, the Engaging Stories for the Study of Attention and Audition (ESSAA) database is here for you (
https://osf.io/uhqtp/). The goal of our work is to help researchers choose interesting (hence, intrinsically-motivating) stimuli when designing studies on speech perception and/or selective attention.
The database contains engagement ratings from undergraduate students, obtained using Kuijpers' Story World Absorption Scale, for a diverse collection of short works whose spoken durations range between approx. 10 and 20 minutes. All of the selected short works are available on the LibriVox free audiobook platform and are in the public domain. We have taken care to select works whose audiobooks are relatively crisp and clean, from a selection of both female and male narrators. Plain text and factual quizzes are also available for all of the stories, as well as a handful of high-fidelity recordings (LibriVox only supplies MP3 files).
We hope this resource will prove useful and we are open to suggestions and requests for works to include as the database grows.
Sincerely,
Lauren Petley
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY, USA