What do babies say?

Welcome fellow citizen scientists!

We need your help to transcribe some very short audio clips that have been taken from very long recordings. We are trying to find out more about the sounds children, and people around them, make.

To study this, we had children aged between 3 months and 5 years wear a recorder for many hours. We then pre-process these audios to find sections that are probably speech-like vocalizations by the child wearing the device. We now need your help to know which sounds the child is saying!

First, we ask you to complete the linked survey, which we have obtained IRB approval for. Then, we ask you to start by practicing on the Training Module. In this first module, we ask you to listen to clips of speech-like vocalizations, and select the transcription that matches what you hear. You can listen to each clip as many times as you would like before making a decision, and you'll get feedback on your answers. Once you feel comfortable with this, please do the google form quiz which will help assess your learning. You will receive a certificate showing your score. After this, we ask that you move on to the final portion of the task: the "Transcriptions" module back on Zooniverse. In this final module, we ask you to listen to audio clips that have speech-like vocalizations in them and provide open-ended IPA transcriptions of what you hear.

Your responses will not only help us describe the sounds babies make, but also to compare different recording devices and even train machine learning algorithms.

So a big thank you for your help!!!

For further questions, please reach out to us via the "Talk" function or contact Dr. Alejandrina Cristia.