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The use of wh-words, including wh-questions and wh-clauses, can be linguistically, conceptually, and interactively challenging to preschoolers. Young children develop mastery of wh-words as they formulate and hear these words during daily interactions in contexts such as preschool classrooms. Observational approaches limit researchers' ability to comprehensively capture the classroom conversations, including wh-words. In the current study, we report the results of the first study using the automated speech recognition (ASR) system coupled with location sensors designed to quantify teachers' wh-words in the literacy activity areas of a preschool classroom. We found that the ASR system is a viable solution to automatically quantify the number of adult wh-words used in preschool classrooms. Our findings demonstrated that the most frequently used adult wh-word type was "what." Classroom adults used more wh-words during time point 1 compared to time point 2. Lastly, a child at risk for developmental delays heard more wh-words per minute than a typically developing child. Future research is warranted to further improve the efforts 

The ability to assess conversational interactions creates a challenge in assessing speaker turns over time, including frequency of occurrence, duration of each turn, and connecting speakers in a multispeaker context. This is of particular interest in the analysis of teacher-student or adult-child interactions in learning spaces. The creation of a visualization mechanism capable of providing a high-level representation of the overall conversational interactions without overburdening educators in reviewing student/child learning engagement would be of great significance. Chord diagrams can visualize such complex and disparate information in compact form. In this study, we explore the creation of ‘Chord Diagrams’ as a way to analyze talk time between a child and adult speakers in learning spaces. The proposed illustration provides an opportunity to study the variations in speech duration and the interaction among speakers that are involved in the communication with each other over a certain time learning duration.