Using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) to Capture the Day-to-Day Linguistic Experiences of Young Adults

Both recently and historically, naturalistic datasets and corpus analyses have played an important role in the formulation and testing of key theories and hypotheses in language development and use. The present work details ways in which an existing tool, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), can be used in the cognitive and language science domains to better understand the content of day-to-day speech. From our sample of 75 young adult college students – a population with diverse linguistic experiences – we found enormous variability in the total amount of speech produced and the number of unique words spoken. Further, we discovered that individuals who speak frequently may not be the same individuals that produce long utterances, and we quantified the contexts in which individuals tend to speak. We argue that studies examining naturalistic speech in adults are rare, and through our data, we aim to demonstrate how the EAR can be used in novel ways to create both individual and group-level corpora of adults’ spoken language use.