The Cross-Linguistic Corpus of Infant-Directed Speech (CCIDS) at the University of Toronto Scarborough

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Overview

How does a mother's speech towards her infant change as the infant gets older? 
Do mothers 'articulate' more clearly to younger infants than they do to older ones? 
Do mothers speaking languages other than English use infant-directed speech in similar ways?

The Cross-Linguistic Corpus of Infant-Directed Speech, or CCIDS, is a project aimed at providing researchers working in Linguistics, Psychology, Speech-Language Pathology, Sociology, and Anthropology with a corpus of longitudinal, transcribed and phoneme-aligned, high-quality recordings of mothers interacting with their young infants in three genetically diverse languages spoken in the Greater Toronto Area: Tagalog, Tamil, and Korean.

The CCIDS is directed by Dr. Chandan Narayan, from the Linguistics program in the Department of Humanities, and is housed at the Laboratory for Infant Studies in the Department of Psychology at UTSC. The CCIDS is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (#487010).

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Methodology

Recording

• Five mothers in each language group (Filipino, Tamil, Korean) interacting with their young infants, recorded at home in natural settings (bedroom, bathroom) and situations (feeding, bathing, playing), using a wireless lavaleir consender microphone and digital recorder at 44.1kHz
• Mothers recorded once, every other month, for one-hour sessions, beginning when the infant is 4-6 months, and continuing until the infant is 14 months
• Following each infant-directed recording, mothers are recorded in conversation (adult-directed speech) with a native language field researcher

Transcription

• Undergraduate researchers in Linguistics and Psychology, whose native language is either Filipino, Tamil, or Korean transcribe time-aligned audio files at the phrase and word level using a character set modified from the CMU pronunciation dictionary

Alignment

• Using speech recognition technology, signal processing teams at IIIT (Hyderabad, India), University of the Philippines Diliman, and Seoul University implement forced phoneme alignment on the acoustic data

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Current personnel

Chandan Narayan - Principle Investigator	Korean	Tamil	Filipino
	Gahee Yun Sae Jin Byeon	Janani Selvachandran Rashmy Amuthan	Ann Tulalian Melissa Marasigan Jestine Abella

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Contact

If you have a young infant and speak to them in either Filipino, Tamil or Korean, and are interested in participating in the CCIDS, please contact Dr. Narayan at ccids.utsc.@gmail.com.

Students intersted in joining the CCIDS research team can contact Dr. Narayan at chandan.narayan@utoronto.ca