@inproceedings{goumri-etal-2024-chica,
    title = "{CHICA}: A Developmental Corpus of Child-Caregiver{'}s Face-to-face vs. Video Call Conversations in Middle Childhood",
    author = {Goumri, Dhia Elhak  and
      Agrawal, Abhishek  and
      Nikolaus, Mitja  and
      Vu, Hong Duc Thang  and
      Bodur, K{\"u}bra  and
      Emmar, Elias  and
      Armand, Cassandre  and
      Mazzocconi, Chiara  and
      Gupta, Shreejata  and
      Pr{\'e}vot, Laurent  and
      Favre, Benoit  and
      Becerra-Bonache, Leonor  and
      Fourtassi, Abdellah},
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.280",
    pages = "3153--3164",
    abstract = "Existing studies of naturally occurring language-in-interaction have largely focused on the two ends of the developmental spectrum, i.e., early childhood and adulthood, leaving a gap in our knowledge about how development unfolds, especially across middle childhood. The current work contributes to filling this gap by introducing CHICA (for Child Interpersonal Communication Analysis), a developmental corpus of child-caregiver conversations \textit{at home}, involving groups of French-speaking children aged 7, 9, and 11 years old. Each dyad was recorded twice: once in a face-to-face setting and once using computer-mediated video calls. For the face-to-face settings, we capitalized on recent advances in mobile, lightweight eye-tracking and head motion detection technology to optimize the naturalness of the recordings, allowing us to obtain both precise and ecologically valid data. Further, we mitigated the challenges of manual annotation by relying {--} to the extent possible {--} on automatic tools in speech processing and computer vision. Finally, to demonstrate the richness of this corpus for the study of child communicative development, we provide preliminary analyses comparing several measures of child-caregiver conversational dynamics across developmental age, modality, and communicative medium. We hope the current corpus will allow new discoveries into the properties and mechanisms of multimodal communicative development across middle childhood.",
}

Existing studies of naturally occurring language-in-interaction have largely focused on the two ends of the developmental spectrum, i.e., early childhood and adulthood, leaving a gap in our knowledge about how development unfolds, especially across middle childhood. The current work contributes to filling this gap by introducing CHICA (for Child Interpersonal Communication Analysis), a developmental corpus of child-caregiver conversations \textit{at home}, involving groups of French-speaking children aged 7, 9, and 11 years old. Each dyad was recorded twice: once in a face-to-face setting and once using computer-mediated video calls. For the face-to-face settings, we capitalized on recent advances in mobile, lightweight eye-tracking and head motion detection technology to optimize the naturalness of the recordings, allowing us to obtain both precise and ecologically valid data. Further, we mitigated the challenges of manual annotation by relying {--} to the extent possible {--} on automatic tools in speech processing and computer vision. Finally, to demonstrate the richness of this corpus for the study of child communicative development, we provide preliminary analyses comparing several measures of child-caregiver conversational dynamics across developmental age, modality, and communicative medium. We hope the current corpus will allow new discoveries into the properties and mechanisms of multimodal communicative development across middle childhood.
Goumri, Dhia Elhak Agrawal, Abhishek Nikolaus, Mitja Vu, Hong Duc Thang Bodur, K{\"u}bra Emmar, Elias Arm , Cass re Mazzocconi, Chiara Gupta, Shreejata Pr{\'e}vot, Laurent Favre, Benoit Becerra-Bonache, Leonor Fourtassi, Abdellah
CHICA: A Developmental Corpus of Child-Caregiver's Face-to-face vs. Video Call Conversations in Middle Childhood