An automated pipeline for efficiently generating standardized, child-friendly audiovisual language stimuli

Creating engaging language stimuli suitable for children can be difficult and time-consuming. To simplify and accelerate the process, we developed an automated pipeline that combines existing audio generation and animation tools to generate customizable audiovisual stimuli from text input. The pipeline consists of two components: the first uses Google Cloud Text-to-Speech to generate audio stimuli from text, and the second uses Adobe Character Animator to create video stimuli in which an animated character "speaks" the audio with speech-aligned mouth movements. We evaluated the pipeline with two stimulus sets, including an acoustic comparison between generated audio stimuli and existing human-recorded stimuli. The pipeline is efficient, taking less than 2 min to generate each audiovisual stimulus, and fewer than 9 % of stimuli needed to be regenerated. The audio generation component is particularly fast, taking less than 1 s per stimulus. By leveraging automated tools for language stimulus creation, this pipeline can facilitate developmental research on language and other domains of cognition, especially in cognitive neuroscience studies that require large numbers of stimuli.