Introduction

CSLU: Kids' Speech Version 1.1 , Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2007S18 and isbn 1-58563-395-X, is a collection of spontaneous and prompted speech from 1100 children between Kindergarten and Grade 10 in the Forest Grove School District in Oregon. All children -- approximately 100 children at each grade level -- read approximately 60 items from a total list of 319 phonetically-balanced but simple words, sentences or digit strings. Each utterance of spontaneous speech begins with a recitation of the alphabet and contains a monologue of about one minute in duration. This release consists of 1017 files containing approximately 8-10 minutes of speech per speaker. Corresponding word-level transcriptions are also included.

This corpus was developed to facilitate research about the characteristics of children's speech at different ages and to train and evaluate recognizers for use in language training and other interactive tasks involving children, including to train recognizers used in language development with deaf children.

Data

Data collection was performed using the CSLU Speech Toolkit and two computers running Windows NT 4.0. Each computer was manned by a CSLU staff member who monitored progress and helped the child with any difficulties. The average time at the computer was 20 minutes, yielding approximately 8-10 minutes of speech digitized at 16 bits and 16kHz using Soundblaster 16 PnP audio cards with head-mounted microphones.

The prompted speech, consisting of 200 isolated words and 10 numeric strings, was presented as text appearing below an animated character that produced accurate visible speech synchronized with recored prompts. A text prompt was also displayed. The child then reproduced the prompted word. Once the prompted speech collection was completed, the experimenter then asked the subject a series of questions designed to elicit spontaneous speech (i.e "Tell me about your favorite movie"). Information about the subject's age, gender, languages spoken and physical conditions affecting speech was also collected.

Samples

For an example of the speech in this corpus, please listen to this sample of spontaneous speech.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2001-2002 Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Health & Science University, © 2007 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania