@article{benus-etal-2026-multi,
    title = "Multi-party Conversational Corpus of {L}1 and {L}2 for Speech Alignment Research (Teams-{SK}): Methodological Approach",
    author = {Benus, Stefan  and
      Gatial, Viktor  and
      Gy{\"o}rgy, Erik  and
      Hrickov{\'a}, M{\'a}ria  and
      Ka{\v{z}}im{\'i}r, Martin  and
      Koz{\'a}{\v{c}}ikov{\'a}, Zuzana  and
      Marekov{\'a}, Lucia  and
      Sabo, R{\'o}bert  and
      Trnka, Marian  and
      Vr{\'a}b, Erik},
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.519/",
    pages = "6536--6546",
    abstract = "The tendency for speakers to align or accommodate their verbal and non-verbal behaviour to their interlocutors is a fundamental mechanism in spoken interaction, strongly associated with successful communication and social bonding. Despite its ubiquity and documentation across various modalities and linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, prosodic), a lack of comparable, multi-layered linguistic resources and methodological agreement prevents a deeper understanding of its cognitive mechanisms. Multidimensional view of speech alignment might enhance its application in areas like language training or human-machine interaction. This paper addresses these gaps by presenting the development of a multilingual corpus of L1 Slovak and L2 English speech, extending a comparable corpus in L1 English. The corpus utilizes a modified cooperative board game, Forbidden Island, to elicit semi-spontaneous, multi-party conversation and introduces a complementary pair game to specifically target and prime syntactic alignment. The resource includes psychological metadata (e.g., personality, anxiety, perceived dominance) and enables a reproducible methodology for investigating the relationship between entrainment patterns and individual characteristics. By providing a non-Germanic language perspective and a direct L1{--}L2 comparison framework at prosodic, lexical, pragmatic and syntactic levels, this corpus offers a rich resource for advancing the theoretical understanding, replication, and practical application of speech alignment."
}