A shared database for the study of the development of language fluency

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The goal of the FluencyBank project is the construction of a shared computerized database of multimedia interactions for the study of the development of speech fluency and disfluency through childhood. We will create a Gold Standard database collected from four groups of participants: Spanish-English bilinguals, late talkers, children who stutter, and normally-developing control children. Working with our Consortium members from 32 sites, we will extend this database with already available recordings and transcripts, as well as additional new data using the new core protocol. The Gold Standard data will be coded extensively for the training of computational linguistic methods for automatic and semi-automatic data analysis. Using these methods, we will create new measures of fluency that we can use to distinguish developmental patterns of recovery from stuttering. Where available, we will supplement this behavioral database with information from genetic and neuroimaging work. The results will be important for the development of the theory of typical and atypical patterns of fluency and disfluency. They will also allow us to better understand the course of fluency development, and to devise and evaluate methods for treating fluency disorders. The results will be important for both research and clinical practice. We will disseminate these data and methods to the wider community through conferences, networking, and technical support systems. All data and methods will be freely available to all interested researchers.