EmoChildRu: Emotional Child Russian Speech Corpus

We present the first child emotional speech corpus in Russian, called “EmoChildRu”, which contains audio materials of 3–7 year old kids. The database includes over 20 K recordings (approx. 30 h), collected from 100 children. Recordings were carried out in three controlled settings by creating different emotional states for children: playing with a standard set of toys; repetition of words from a toy-parrot in a game store setting; watching a cartoon and retelling of the story, respectively. This corpus is designed to study the reflection of the emotional state in the characteristics of voice and speech and for studies of the formation of emotional states in ontogenesis. A portion of the corpus is annotated for three emotional states (discomfort, neutral, comfort). Additional data include brain activity measurements (original EEG, evoked potentials records), the results of the adult listeners analysis of child speech, questionnaires, and description of dialogues. The paper reports two child emotional speech analysis experiments on the corpus: by adult listeners (humans) and by an automatic classifier (machine), respectively. Automatic classification results are very similar to human perception, although the accuracy is below 55 % for both, showing the difficulty of child emotion recognition from speech under naturalistic conditions.