Theoretical and Methodological Insights From Five Transcribed and Annotated Daylong Audio Recordings of Young Children’s Language Environments

Abstract

As we come to appreciate the role that the language environment plays in language learning, there is an increased interest in measuring children’s auditory input. Recording methods that capture a full day’s worth of a child’s auditory environment are increasingly available to researchers. These methods have the potential to provide insight into language learning, but substantial challenges remain in the annotation and analysis of large amounts of audio data. In this work, we describe five fully transcribed and annotated (ACLEW annotation scheme) daylong audio recordings of children’s language environments. We first describe our lab’s workflow by which these transcripts were created, with recommendations for teams who may want to undertake manual transcription and annotation. We then describe four insights about children’s language environments that emerge through the transcription and annotation of full daylong recordings. This work provides both practical and theoretical insights into the nature of children’s language environments that we hope will inform not only new hypotheses but also observational and experimental methodologies.