Investigating Variability in Child Speech (VariCS) – the VariCS corpus

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Kuschmann, Anja and Murali, Mridhula and Taylor, Lauren and Smith, Amy and Cleland, Joanne and Stuart-Smith, Jane and Young, David (2024) Investigating Variability in Child Speech (VariCS) – the VariCS corpus. Center for Open Science, Charlottesville, VA. (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WF2R9)

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Abstract

The Variability in Child Speech (VariCS) corpus is a collection of a range of speech data from 275 Scottish primary school children aged five to twelve years. The aim of the speech corpus is to systematically describe variability in child speech development from a cross-sectional and longitudinal perspective and to establish typical ranges for acoustic measures associated with the speech subsystems of respiration, phonation, resonance, and articulation. The data are collected from three cohorts of children at four time points over the course of 18 months; we have currently collected three time points with another time point to follow. At each time point children are asked to complete a series of speech tasks including a story retell, a picture description, repetitions of sentences, single word productions, sound prolongations and rapid syllable repetitions. The data is complemented by ultrasound data, which was collected from a subgroup of children at time point 1 and 2. Data collection is taking place in primary schools in seven Scottish councils, representing rural and urban areas of Scotland. Detailed demographic information is gathered, including age, dialectal background, languages spoken, and relevant medical information. Ranges for key acoustic measures will be made publicly available via the VariCS website [varics.ac.uk], OSF and the University of Strathclyde repository PURE.

ORCID iDs

Kuschmann, Anja ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5396-9008, Murali, Mridhula ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5450-6419, Taylor, Lauren, Smith, Amy, Cleland, Joanne ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0660-1646, Stuart-Smith, Jane and Young, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3652-0513;
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