Collaborative Research: Establishing a Child Speech Fluency Database

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

How children learn to produce speech smoothly without stops, restarts, errors, or omissions (known as speech fluency), has received little research attention. Some children who exhibit fluency difficulties, such as later-talking and bilingual children, are misdiagnosed with speech disorders such as stuttering as a result. However different fluency issues require different types of speech or language therapy. A better understanding of typical fluency development and of different types of fluency problems can inform the neural, linguistic and motor coordination demands that underlie speech fluency. The goal of the current project is to develop a comprehensive database archive of audio and video recordings of child speech and their corresponding transcripts that can be used for both basic and clinical research on the development of speech fluency in children. This project examines fluency development during the preschool years in typical, late-talking, and bilingual children, by using existing data contributed to the CHILDES Project (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu), an open access archive of children's speech samples. Additional corpora from late-talking and bilingual children will also be included to establish a new, more comprehensive "Fluency Bank" archive. All corpora will be reformatted to validate and revise transcripts, index speech rate, characterize disfluencies, and code speech for grammatical features. Automatic and semi-automatic approaches will be used to link audio recordings and transcripts. The resulting Fluency Bank will become an important and unique research resource for those interested in fluency development in both typically and atypically developing children.