Collaborative Research: Establishing a Child Speech Fluency Database

孩子们如何学会流畅地说话而不停顿、重新开始、错误或遗漏（称为语言流利），很少受到研究的关注。一些表现出流利困难的孩子，比如说话晚的孩子和会说两种语言的孩子，被误诊为语言障碍，比如口吃。然而，不同的流利问题需要不同类型的言语或语言治疗。更好地理解典型的流利发展和不同类型的流利问题，可以告知神经、语言和运动协调需求，这是语言流利的基础。当前项目的目标是建立一个综合的儿童语言录音和录像档案及其相应的转录本，可用于儿童语言流利发展的基础和临床研究。本项目通过使用CHILDES项目（www.childes.psy.cmu.edu）提供的现有数据（一个开放获取的儿童语言样本档案），研究了典型的、晚说话的和双语儿童在学龄前的流利程度发展情况。还将包括来自晚说话和双语儿童的额外语料库，以建立一个新的，更全面的“流利库”档案。所有语料库将被重新格式化，以验证和修改转录本，索引语音率，表征不流利，并为语法特征编码语音。将使用自动和半自动的方法将录音和抄本联系起来。对于那些对典型和非典型发展儿童的流利发展感兴趣的人来说，由此产生的流利库将成为一个重要而独特的研究资源。

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.