'Construct a new TIMIT corpus reader in the given directory.
:param root: The root directory for this corpus.'

def __init__(self, root, encoding=u'utf8'):

    if isinstance(encoding, string_types):
        encoding = [(u'.*\\.wav', None), (u'.*', encoding)]
    CorpusReader.__init__(self, root, find_corpus_fileids(root, self._FILE_RE), encoding=encoding)
    self._utterances = [name[:(-4)] for name in find_corpus_fileids(root, self._UTTERANCE_RE)]
    u'A    list    of    the    utterance    identifiers    for    all    utterances    in\n                                this    corpus.'
    self._speakerinfo = None
    self._root = root
    self.speakers = sorted(set((u.split(u'/')[0] for u in self._utterances)))
