Building Infrastructure for Longitudinal Speech Data Collection

自然语言的录音对于研究语言科学中广泛的主题是至关重要的。有声日记可以成为数据的重要来源，特别是在语言和社会的界面上进行研究。录音使日记作者能够以普通和随意的方式表达自己，让语言研究人员对过去和现在的日常语言有了更清晰的了解。更广泛地说，日记长期以来一直是人类历史上记录事件和经历的重要工具，提供有助于理解文化遗产的信息。该项目建立在2020年4月开始的一项试点研究的基础上，该研究记录了人们对新冠肺炎大流行及以后疫情的日常体验。日记作者使用一个定制的移动应用程序来记录他们的口头日记条目。移动应用程序通过让任何人都可以轻松地作为公民科学家做出贡献，使数据收集变得大众化。应用程序代码是公开的，供其他科学家适应自己的使用。匿名音频和抄本通过公共图书馆储存库永久提供给公众和其他研究人员。该奖项支持改善和扩大远程音频日记基础设施，以通过开发改进的应用程序技术和与青年组织的长期社区伙伴关系来优化参与者的招募和留住。这些自我录制的音频日记为语言研究提供了几个好处。首先，研究人员可以从广泛的地理区域的参与者那里获得数据，从而能够对正在进行的语言变化进行大规模分析。其次，来自相同演讲者的重复输入使研究人员能够实时跟踪个人参与社区层面的声音变化。第三，利用日记条目的体裁可以从说话者那里获得重要的个人社会洞察力，丰富对语言和社会过程之间关系的理解。收集的数据使研究人员能够通过比较儿童、青春期前和青少年说话者语言产出中正在进行的声音变化的变异性，来检验现有的关于青春期前社会语言校准的假设。关于青春期后参与正在进行的声音变化的现有假设也可以得到检验。这一基础设施的成功将有助于在所要求的资助期之后继续收集数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Recordings of natural speech are crucial for research on a wide-range of topics in the language sciences. Audio diaries can form an important source for data, especially for research at the interface of language and society. Audio recording allows diarists to express themselves in ordinary and casual ways, giving language researchers a clearer view of everyday language in the past and the present. More generally, diaries have long been important tools in human history for recording events and experiences, providing information that can contribute to the understanding of cultural heritage. This project builds on a pilot study that began in April 2020, capturing people's day-to-day experience of the COVID pandemic and beyond. Diarists use a custom mobile app to record their spoken diary entry. Mobile apps democratize data collection by making it easy for anyone to contribute as a citizen scientist. App code is made public, for other scientists to adapt for their own use. Anonymized audio and transcripts are made available to the public and other researchers in perpetuity via a public library repository. This award supports the improvement and expansion of the remote audio diaries infrastructure to optimize participant recruitment and retention through the development of improved app technology and long-term community partnerships with youth organizations. These self-recorded audio diaries provide several benefits for linguistic research. First, researchers can obtain data from participants across a wide geographic area, enabling a large-scale analysis of ongoing language changes. Second, repeated entries from the same speakers enable researchers to track individual participation in community-level sound change in real time. Third, leveraging the genre of diary entries results in important personal social insights from speakers, enriching the understanding of the relationship between linguistic and social processes. The data collected enable researchers to test existing hypotheses about preteen sociolinguistic calibration, by comparing variability of ongoing sound changes in child, preteen, and teenage speakers' language production. Existing hypotheses regarding post-adolescent participation in ongoing sound change can also be tested. The success of this infrastructure will facilitate continuous collection of data beyond the requested funding period.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.