| title | ChildVox: A Speech, Audio, and Large Audio-Language Model Benchmark in Understanding and Characterizing Sound across Childhood |
|---|---|
| authors | Tiantian Feng, Anfeng Xu, Xuan Shi, Aditya Kommineni, Shakhrul Iman Siam, Megan Micheletti, Zhonghao Shi, Helen Tager-Flusberg, Mi Zhang, Lynn K. Perry, Catherine Lord, Daniel Messinger, Shrikanth Narayanan |
| date | 2026-05-28 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2605.29257 |
| affiliation | University of Southern California |
| upvotes | 5 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf |
| abstract | We present ChildVox, a novel benchmark for characterizing the diverse acoustic signals through which children communicate. Specifically, ChildVox follows the full developmental trajectory from birth through school age, covering physiological sounds, non-linguistic vocalizations, canonical syllables, and spoken language. ChildVox integrates more than 20 sub-tasks across 17 child-centered audio and speech datasets, enabling systematic cross-corpus and cross-domain comparison. We evaluate a representative range of audio and speech foundation models, including self-supervised, ASR-oriented, and large audio-language models, on tasks including physiological sound classification, vocalization and canonical syllables modeling, and speech quality assessment and recognition. Benchmark results show that ChildVox provides a suite of high-performance models in recognizing a wide range of acoustic signals from children, supporting downstream applications such as characterizing children's language levels and tracking speech production with age. |
cite
@misc{feng2026childvox,
title={ChildVox: A Speech, Audio, and Large Audio-Language Model Benchmark in Understanding and Characterizing Sound across Childhood},
author={Tiantian Feng and Anfeng Xu and Xuan Shi and Aditya Kommineni and Shakhrul Iman Siam and Megan Micheletti and Zhonghao Shi and Helen Tager-Flusberg and Mi Zhang and Lynn K. Perry and Catherine Lord and Daniel Messinger and Shrikanth Narayanan},
year={2026},
eprint={2605.29257},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29257}
}