Creating a Corpus of Multilingual Parent-Child Speech Remotely: Lessons Learned in a Large-Scale Onscreen Picturebook Sharing Task

Abstract

With lockdowns and social distancing measures in place, research teams looking to collect naturalistic parent-child speech interactions have to develop alternatives to in-lab recordings and observational studies with long-stretch recordings. We designed a novel micro-longitudinal study, the Talk Together Study, which allowed us to create a rich corpus of parent-child speech interactions in a fully online environment (N participants = 142, N recordings = 410). In this paper, we discuss the methods we used, and the lessons learned during adapting and running the study. These lessons learned cover nine domains of research design, monitoring and feedback: Recruitment strategies, Surveys and Questionnaires, Video-call scheduling, Speech elicitation tools, Videocall protocols, Participant remuneration strategies, Project monitoring, Participant retention, and Data Quality, and may be used as a primer for teams planning to conduct remote studies in the future.

MERLIon CCS Challenge: A English-Mandarin code-switching child-directed speech corpus for language identification and diarization

“…The audio data collection was part of the Talk Together Study, a large developmental study conducted in Singapore [19]. The study is approved by the Nanyang Technological Institutional IRB Board (IRB-2018-10-001).…”

Online testing in developmental science: A guide to design and implementation

“…Many researchers of caregiver-child interaction studies opt for synchronous data collection (e.g., Pochinki et al, 2021;Segal & Moulson, 2021;Shin et al, 2021;Woon et al, 2021), although these types of studies have been carried out asynchronously too (e.g., Addyman & Scott, 2020;Rhodes et al, 2020). Some measures can be coded from a webcam or audio recording.…”

“…Several studies have used pictures or picture-books displayed on the screen to capture verbal interactions (e.g., Rhodes et al, 2020;Woon et al, 2021). Since the item is displayed digitally, this is easy to standardize across participants.…”

Measuring Language Development From Child-centered Recordings

“…Indeed, they are reliant on languages being well-resourced. Moreover, human annotation is particularly impractical for languages which are understudied and in populations that are highly multilingual [6].…”