Help computers to understand how kids talk!

For kids ages 2-8 years old

This study has four parts. The first part is just words by themselves: your child will see a picture and word (for example, a rabbit) and be asked to say it. The second part is full sentences (for example, “The rabbit ate a cookie”) which your child can read and say alone, or you can say it first and they can copy you. The third part is freely describing pictures, and you will prompt your child to describe lots of parts of a picture. The fourth part is talking for a bit with your child based on prompts like “what’s your favorite dinosaur and why?” We will ask you for permission about how we can use your child’s audio and video, with options ranging from only sharing your audio (not video) and only our university research team can use it, to sharing both the audio and video for a public research dataset, so that many scientists can benefit from it.

We want to learn how children’s speech changes as they grow, and how well computers can understand what children say. Increasingly, educational tools are being built to listen and respond to our voices, but children’s voices can be harder for computers to understand than adults’. By collecting short recordings from lots of children of different ages, we hope to help researchers and technology developers build better tools for children and understand how children’s speech develops.

Up to 20 minutes - 10 minutes for the first half, and in the second half you can choose how long you and your child want to keep talking.

Each child can only participate in this study once for compensation. We will email you a $5 Amazon gift card from Amazon.com (via a code that can be entered online) within ten days to thank you for your time. To be eligible for the gift card, (1) your child must be in the age range for this study, and (2) you need to submit a valid consent statement in which we can see you AND your child in the frame. Please make sure you are with your child throughout, especially if they cannot click the buttons (they can point and you can click their answer).