History of the IFA Spoken Language Corpus The initial corpus has been designed, recorded, and transcribed under the responsibility of R.J.J.H. van Son with the technical assistence of Ton Wempe (recordings, Ton.Wempe@uva.nl), David Weenink (computer systems, David.Weenink@uva.nl), and others at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (IFA@hum.uva.nl, Faculty of the Humanities, Departement of Language and Literature, Chair of Phonetic Sciences). Paul Boersma (Paul.Boersma@uva.nl) and David Weenink kindly adapted the Praat program to some of corpus' special needs and allowed the distribution of the Praat program with this corpus. Contact address: R.J.J.H.vanSon@uva.nl Prof. Louis Pols (Chair of Phonetic Sciences, university of Amsterdam, Louis.Pols@uva.nl) gave advice on the design and organization of the corpus and is responsible for all things Instrumental in the institute. This work was funded by the NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, (grant # 355-75-001) and a grant of the Dutch "Stichting Spraaktechnologie". Organisational and legal advice as well as invaluable practical help was given by Alice Dijkstra and Monique van Donzel of the NWO. All matters regarding copyright, both legal and practical, were organized by Elisabeth D'Halleweijn of the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie). The stories used ('De noordenwind en de zon' and 'Jorinde en Joringel') were taken from "The principles of the International Phonetic Association" (London, 1949, http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html) and from the "Kinder- und Hausmaerchen der Brueder Grimm" (1857; http://maerchen.com/) respectively. Both were translated and adaptated by Rob van Son. The phoneme labeling was performed by the Speech Processing Expertise Centre, SPEX. Phoneme labels and speech were first aligned by means of automatic speech recognition (forced segmentation) and then manually corrected by student assistants. Phoneme aligment and daily student support was performed by Diana Binnenpoorte (D.Binnenpoorte@let.kun.nl); project management was carried out by Henk van den Heuvel (H.v.d.Heuvel@let.kun.nl). The student assistants involved were: Jenneke Boeijink, Loek Boerboom, Wilske Driessen, Rianne Haak, Jaap Peters, Michel van Pijkeren and Nathalie Rompen. David Weenink (David.Weenink@uva.nl) from the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam kindly suplied the Dynamic Time Warping program (CGN_phonemes.pl and dtw_phonemes.pl) used to align the words and syllables with the hand labeled phoneme strings. Our collegues at the Spoken Dutch Corpus Effort (Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) kindly supplied the automatic Part Of Speech and Lemma tagging.