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

Creating engaging, well-controlled neuroimaging tasks 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, such as for studies of language comprehension. The pipeline consists of two components: the first generates auditory stimuli from text using Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, and the second uses Adobe Character Animator to create video stimuli in which an animated character says the stimuli out loud. We evaluated the pipeline with two stimulus sets, including comparing generated audio stimuli to existing human-recorded stimuli. The pipeline is efficient, taking less than 2 minutes to generate each audiovisual stimulus, and less than 9% of stimuli needed to be regenerated. The audio generation component is particularly fast, taking less than 1 second per stimulus, and the resulting stimuli are less variable in pitch and some measures of intensity than human-recorded audio stimuli. This pipeline demonstrates the potential of leveraging automated tools for stimuli development, especially for stimuli that are time-consuming to create manually and for designs that require large quantities of well-controlled stimuli.