Characterizing the content of bilingual language in preschoolers with HL

Project Summary This Administrative Supplement will support post-baccalaureate researcher, Gabriela Gutierrez, to receive research training through her mentored leadership of a project characterizing the bilingual language input and bilingual language production of children with hearing loss. The Supplement builds

on parent R01 (DC018542) that gathers objective, longitudinal data to capture the vocal interactions of children with hearing loss (HL). Inclusion of children with HL and typically hearing peers in preschool classrooms is a national standard, but it is not clear how early vocal interaction with peers and teachers

contributes to the language development of children with and without HL. The parent R01 employs computational models of child location and orientation to indicate when children are in social contact with their peers and teachers. To support primary project analyses, the parent R01 characterizes classroom speech as English and Spanish by harnessing noise-robust automatic speech recognition

tools. The parent R01 Aim 1 determines whether exposure to partner speech longitudinally predicts children’s speech to those partners. To support that Aim, Supplement activities include a) conducting expert (manual) transcription of R01 audio recordings in English and Spanish to determine the content

of children and teachers’ vocalizations and b) assessing the reliability of automated speech recognition tools when compared to expert transcription. Automated speech recognition tools will include Open AI’s Whisper, which is a privacy-preserving deep learning neural network. Ms. Gutierrez will train and

supervise a team of experts to transcribe segments of English and Spanish child and teacher speech to quantify multiple features of classroom language. These features are mean length of utterance (MLU), lexical diversity, questions, responsivity to partner utterances, and the alignment of teacher and child

speech, e.g., the degree to which teachers and children use the same words as their interlocutor in responses. Ms. Gutierrez will be mentored in the selection and use of automated tools, the calculation of reliability measures, the interpretation and write-up of study statistical results, and the intersection of

children’s bilingualism and hearing loss. As the Supplement research focuses on characterizing the bilingual experiences in preschool classrooms, Ms. Gutierrez’s bilingual language skills are critical for the successful completion of the project. The training afforded to her by the Supplement will help her

accomplish her long-term objective of conducting independent research focused on language development and bilingualism. In support of this long-term objective, Ms. Gutierrez will pursue three Supplement goals: expand her knowledge base in language research and bilingual development (Goal 1); enhance her computational and quantitative analysis skills (Goal 2); and develop her leadership

abilities in conducting research with diverse populations (Goal 3).