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. 2021 Sep;24(5):e13090.
doi: 10.1111/desc.13090. Epub 2021 Apr 6.

Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus

Margaret Cychosz  1 , Alejandrina Cristia  2 , Elika Bergelson  3 , Marisa Casillas  4 , Gladys Baudet  3 , Anne S Warlaumont  5 , Camila Scaff  2   6 , Lisa Yankowitz  7 , Amanda Seidl  8
Affiliations

Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus

Margaret Cychosz et al. Dev Sci. 2021 Sep.

Abstract

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba" vs. "ee"). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter-annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in-lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine-grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large-scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.

Keywords: babbling; crosslinguistic; crowdsourcing; infants; naturalistic recording; speech; vocal development.

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Figures

Figure A2
Figure A2
Canonical and non-canonical clips by age (in months)
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Overview of the methods showing recording devices used and stages of processing. LENA, Language ENvironment Analysis
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Annotations by corpus: raw counts
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Canonical proportion by child age and corpus. Shaded band surrounding regression line represents 95% confidence intervals. Each point represents one child and point size refers to the number of clips used to calculate canonical proportion
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Children in the current study whose canonical proportion is above 0.15, plotted by age (in months)
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Canonical proportion by child age (months) across the four corpora that contained cross-sectional age samples. Note that x-axis scales differ by corpus
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Canonical proportion by child age (months) and gender
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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