This paper introduces the LetsRead Corpus of European Portuguese read speech from 6 to 10 years old children. The motivation for the creation of this corpus stems from the inexistence of databases with recordings of reading tasks of Portuguese children with different performance levels and including all the common reading aloud disfluencies. It is also essential to develop techniques to fulfill the main objective of the LetsRead project: to automatically evaluate the reading performance of children through the analysis of reading tasks. The collected data amounts to 20 hours of speech from 284 children from private and public Portuguese schools, with each child carrying out two tasks: reading sentences and reading a list of pseudowords, both with varying levels of difficulty throughout the school grades. In this paper, the design of the reading tasks presented to children is described, as well as the collection procedure. Manually annotated data is analyzed according to disfluencies and reading performance. The considered word difficulty parameter is also confirmed to be suitable for the pseudoword reading tasks.

Hesitations, so-called disfluencies, are a characteristic of spontaneous speech, playing a primary role in its structure, reflecting aspects of the language production and the management of inter-communication. In this paper we intend to present a database of hesitations in European Portuguese speech - HESITA - as a relevant base of work to study a variety of speech phenomena. Patterns of hesitations, hesitation distribution according to speaking style, and phonetic properties of the fillers are some of the characteristics we extrapolated from the HESITA database. This database also represents an important resource for improvement in synthetic speech naturalness as well as in robust acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition. The HESITA database is the output of a project in the speech-processing field for European Portuguese held by an interdisciplinary group in intimate articulation between engineering tools and experience and the linguistic approach.