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.
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | Charlottesville, VA |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 12 Dec 2024 |
Funding
The corpus data is collected as part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council Grant [ES/W003244/1] on ‘Variability in Child Speech (VariCS)’. We thank the head teachers of the 23 participating schools for their interest in and commitment to our longitudinal study and the children for being part of this speech project.
Keywords
- Variability in Child Speech
- primary school children
- speech analysis