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This paper reports on the creation and composition of a new corpus of children’s speech, the Ohio Child Speech Corpus, which is publicly available on the Talkbank-CHILDES website. The audio corpus contains speech samples from 303 children ranging in age from 4 – 9 years old, all of whom participated in a seven-task elicitation protocol conducted in a science museum lab. In addition, an interactive social robot controlled by the researchers joined the sessions for approximately 60% of the children, and the corpus itself was collected in the peri‑pandemic period. Two analyses are reported that highlighted these last two features. One set of analyses found that the children spoke significantly more in the presence of the robot relative to its absence, but no effects of speech complexity (as measured by MLU) were found for the robot’s presence. Another set of analyses compared children tested immediately post-pandemic to children tested a year later on two school-readiness tasks, an Alphabet task and a Reading Passages task. This analysis showed no negative impact on these tasks for our highly-educated sample of children just coming off of the pandemic relative to those tested later. These analyses demonstrate just two possible types of questions that this corpus could be used to investigate. 

This corpus was collected in the Language Sciences Research Lab, a working lab embedded inside of a science museum: the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, USA. Participants were recruited from the floor of the museum and run in a semi-public space. Three distinctive features of the corpus are: (1) an interactive social robot (specifically, a Jibo robot) was present and participated in the sessions for roughly half the children; (2) all children were recorded with a lapel mic generating high quality audio (available through CHILDES), as well as a distal table mic generating low quality audio (available on request) to facilitate strong tests of automated speech processing on the data; and (3) the data were collected in the peri-pandemic period, beginning in the summer of 2021 just after COVID-19 restrictions were being eased and ending in the summer of 2022 – thus providing a snapshot of language development in a distinctive time of the world. A YouTube video on the Jibo robot is available here .