Abstract
With lockdowns and social distancing measures in place, research teams looking to collect naturalistic parent-child speech interactions have to develop alternatives to in-lab recordings and observational studies with long-stretch recordings. We designed a novel micro-longitudinal study, the Talk Together Study, which allowed us to create a rich corpus of parent-child speech interactions in a fully online environment (N participants = 142, N recordings = 410). In this paper, we discuss the methods we used, and the lessons learned during adapting and running the study. These lessons learned cover nine domains of research design, monitoring and feedback: Recruitment strategies, Surveys and Questionnaires, Video-call scheduling, Speech elicitation tools, Videocall protocols, Participant remuneration strategies, Project monitoring, Participant retention, and Data Quality, and may be used as a primer for teams planning to conduct remote studies in the future.
Highlights
Singapore is a diverse environment for studying language acquisition, with 74.3% of the population reporting literacy in two or more languages (Department of Statistics of Singapore, 2021)
In the original research plan, a visit to the family home would initiate a series of audio recordings, including high fidelity recording of the parent’s voice in their different languages, a parent-child interaction centred on a picture-book narration task, and a day-long ambient speech recording using a baby-worn recording device [e.g., a Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) device (Gilkerson and Richards, 2008)]
Given the primary goal of the current study was to build up a corpus of parent-child interactions, we developed new synchronous researcher-led online protocols to meet the need for data quality checks at the onset of recording
Summary
Singapore is a diverse environment for studying language acquisition, with 74.3% of the population reporting literacy in two or more languages (Department of Statistics of Singapore, 2021). In the original research plan, a visit to the family home would initiate a series of audio recordings, including high fidelity recording of the parent’s voice in their different languages, a parent-child interaction centred on a picture-book narration task, and a day-long ambient speech recording using a baby-worn recording device [e.g., a Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) device (Gilkerson and Richards, 2008)]. Strict lockdown measures from 8 April, 2020 precluded visits to family homes (Ministry of Health Singapore, 2020). With our corpus-building goals in mind, we designed a novel study that would allow us to develop a large corpus of parentchild speech. The Talk Together Study is a remote micro-longitudinal study in which parent-child
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