Canonical babble development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus [post]

Meg Cychosz, Alejandrina Cristia, Elika Bergelson, Marisa Casillas, Gladys Baudet, Anne S. Warlaumont, Camila Scaff, Lisa Yankowitz, Amanda Seidl
2019 unpublished
This study evaluates if babbling emerges similarly in children across diverse cultural contexts. Fifty-two children (1-36 months), exposed to five languages, were recorded over the course of one day. Citizen scientists annotated short clips from these recordings to determine if child vocalizations were canonical or not ("ba" versus "a"). Canonical babble increased over age. A .15 ratio of canonical to non-canonical babbles emerged around 7 months, replicating previous findings, but in data from
more » ... natural environments of linguistically diverse samples. This work exemplifies how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish reliable developmental milestones. Audio clips used for this project were compiled into a large-scale infant babble corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.
doi:10.31234/osf.io/9vzs5 fatcat:hpj4sxddojhbdmngs4wqouzs2i