Collaborative Research: Establishing a Child Speech Fluency Database

儿童如何学习流畅地说出语言而不停顿、不重新开始、不出错或不遗漏(称为语言流畅性)，这方面的研究很少受到关注。一些表现出流利性困难的儿童，如后来说话的儿童和双语儿童，结果被误诊为口吃等言语障碍。然而，不同的流利性问题需要不同类型的言语或语言治疗。更好地了解典型的流利性发展和不同类型的流利性问题，可以了解构成语言流畅性的神经、语言和运动协调需求。目前项目的目标是开发一个全面的数据库档案，其中包括儿童言语的音频和视频记录及其相应的抄本，可用于儿童言语流利性发展的基础和临床研究。该项目通过使用儿童语言样本的开放获取档案--Childes Project(www.Childes.pen.cmu.edu)提供的现有数据，考察了典型的、说话迟缓的和双语儿童在学龄前几年的流利性发展。此外，还将收录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“流利性银行”档案。所有语料库将被重新格式化，以验证和修改成绩单，索引语速，描述不流利的特征，并为语法特征编码语音。将使用自动和半自动方法将录音和文字记录联系起来。由此产生的流利性银行将成为那些对典型和非典型发育儿童的流利性发展感兴趣的人的重要和独特的研究资源。

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.