The USC CARE corpus: child-psychologist interactions of children with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

We introduce the USC CARE Corpus, comprised of spontaneous and standardized child-psychologist interactions of children with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The audio-video data is collected in the context of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), which is a tool used by psychologists for a research-level diagnosis of ASD for children. The interaction consists of developmentally appropriate semi-structured social activities, providing the psychologist with a sample of behavior used to rate the child on a series of autism-relevant symptoms. Our goal with this multimodal corpus is to investigate how analytical technology (e.g., speech and language processing) can enhance this observational rating task and provide greater insight into social behavior and communication. We provide demographic statistics on the recruited children (60 to date), describe the multimodal recording set-up, and discuss current and future work for this novel corpus. Index Terms: autism, autism spectrum disorders, children’s speech, corpus, multimodal recordings, prosody