kidLUCID: London UCL Children’s Clear Speech in Interaction Database

We are delighted to announce the availability of a new corpus of spontaneous speech for children aged 9 to 14 years inclusive, produced as part of the ESRC-funded project on ‘Speaker-controlled Variability in Children's Speech in Interaction’ (PI: Valerie Hazan).

Speech recordings (a total of 288 conversations) are available for 96 child participants (46M, 50F, range 9;0 to 15;0 years), all native southern British English speakers. Participants were recorded in pairs while completing the diapix spot-the-difference picture task in which the pair verbally compared two scenes, only one of which was visible to each talker. High-quality digital recordings were made in sound-treated rooms. For each conversation, a stereo audio recording is provided with each speaker on a separate channel together with a Praat Textgrid containing separate word- and phoneme-level segmentations for each speaker.

There are six recordings per speaker pair made in the following conditions:

• NOB (No barrier): both speakers heard each other normally

• VOC (Vocoder): one conversational partner heard the other's speech after it had been processed in real time through a noise-excited three channel vocoder

• BAB (Babble): one conversational partner heard the other's speech in a background of adult multi-talker babble at an approximate SNR of 0 dB.

The kidLUCID corpus is available online within the OSCAAR (Online Speech/Corpora Archive and Analysis Resource) archive (https://oscaar.ci.northwestern.edu/). Free access can be requested for research purposes. Further information about the project can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/research/shaps/research/clear-speech-strategies

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant No. RES-062- 23-3106.