Tag Archives: first language acquisition

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company

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In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear.

This could be amazing. I’d love to see a write-up and the TED Talk. It’s not up yet 🙁

EDIT – The video was published (see below).  I’m not as excited about the talk as I thought I would be. Over have of it is essentially an advertisement for his new company focusing on social media analysis. However, I hope that he publishes (or someone associated with the group does so) findings of words, locations, interlocutors, and such.  Like many of the commenters are suggesting, this doesn’t seems to provide anything new theoretically; however, it can help to support (or weaken) these existing theories considering there has never been as complete (and unobtrusive) collection of data of this kind ever.

 

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

via ted.com

Great video and new data on morpheme recognition (distinction) in infants. This is not a new idea. This has been rather well known for years, but the new technology allows for better measurement of this phenomenon. In short, babies are excellent at recognizing and distinguishing sounds from any language, given exposure, up until around 6-8 months. This ability falls off later.

Given the brevity of the presentation, I can’t criticize her too much, but her description of the critical period and what it means to learn a language is certainly not complete. In fact, from what we see here, it is downright misinformed. Her comment that no scientist doubts that a critical period exists (as presented on the chart) is absolutely wrong. In reality, many do.

She is talking almost entirely about sound recognition and distinction, but she uses an SLA theory on language that involves so much more. It’s always difficult to mix-in theories from different fields without operationalizing your terms. I’m going to guess that’s where the 10-minute time limit is restricting.

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