The LSC Reference Corpus is a project that has been developed since the end of 2012 at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. The general objective is to have a representative sample of LSC in terms of its geographical, register, generational, social and discourse genre variation. With this end in mind, more than 60 hours of data from 42 native signers are being collected from six different cities in Catalonia. The recorded data is accompanied by a neutral and general synchronized transcription and annotation, which will have the potential to be expanded. The website where annotations and video data will be available will offer both open and restricted access for easy use in LSC research and learning.
The signed data includes semi-spontaneous and elicited discourse, and contains different discourse genres, such as narration, description, explanation, argumentation and dialogue. To date, the data collection has been made from a selection of associations of the deaf, including, for the moment, the Deaf Association in Terrassa (APESOTE), the Youth Commission within the Catalan Federation for the Deaf (FESOCA), the Deaf Home in Lleida, the Association of the Deaf in Blanes, the Association Center for the Deaf in the Baix Empordà, the Deaf House in Barcelona (CASAL) and the Cultural Recreational Center of the Deaf in Barcelona (CERECUSOR), the deaf association in Cambrils and the deaf association in Vic. In each deaf association, six deaf signers were selected based on gender, age, and having direct deaf relatives (parents or siblings) or having boarded in a specific school for deaf children. The selected associations meet the criteria for registering male-female signing pairs in the young group (18-30 years), middle-aged group (31-50 years) and advanced age group (51-80 years). Following a common practice that is recognized as fundamental in sign language data collection methodology, recordings are guided at all times by a deaf interviewer from the area. The fact that the interviewer is a deaf person adds naturalness to the filming session and prevents the sign language that spontaneously signers sign from having a structural, lexical or stylistic influence from the spoken language of the environment.