Literacy news

Big Brother untangles baby babble

2 Jul 2009

In 2005, Deb Roy, an artificial intelligence researcher, set out to understand how children learn.

"We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate," Roy said.

The projects fits itself snugly within a hotly debated question. On one side, scientists argue that children have an innate hard-wired ability to learn language, while on the other side, researchers argue that language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them.

The first task was to transcribe everything Roy's son heard or said from nine to 24 months, a task that immediately set the research apart from what came before. Previous studies have only offered snapshots of a child's development. Roy said: "If you are interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view." His solution was to wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record his son's every waking moment.

The project has been called the Human Speechome project and is an important first step toward "creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," said Frank Moss, the Director of MIT's Media Lab at the time.

Now, a quarter of a million hours later, Professor Roy is beginning to tease apart the masses of data and look for answers. He estimates that there is somewhere between 10 to 12 million words of speech to transcribe. Although the data sets are still incomplete, Professor Roy says they are already beginning to see interesting results.

It remains to be seen whether other scientists will accept his conclusions as they are based on the analysis of just one child and, as Professor Roy admits, are unlikely to be reproduced because of time and cost.

(BBC News, 02 July 2009)

Tags: Early Years, Talk To Your Baby

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