The question of how children acquire language has long intrigued parents and scholars. MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy recently found a novel way to study what he calls “word birth.” He wired his home with cameras and microphones, and recorded his infant son’s every utterance as he grew into toddlerhood. He then combined the 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio into some astonishing montages. Dr. Roy shared his findings at a TED conference. More visuals and audio from the study in this article from Fast Company. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Word Birth”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Not that long ago on the show, we talked about how kids acquire language.
We had a great conversation about that with a caller.
And do you know, right after that, there was a fascinating article in Wired magazine
About this astonishing project by an MIT cognitive scientist.
His name is Deb Roy, and this involved his newborn son.
Deb Roy and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones to capture every single word that this baby said.
That’s taking it a little far, don’t you think?
I know.
I post pictures on Facebook.
Yeah, I post pictures on Facebook.
I mean, I keep a couple shots on my phone.
But what are you going to do with all that video?
Oh, my gosh.
All that audio?
Well, they ended up having 90,000 hours of video and 140,000.
90,000.
Yes, yes.
And 140,000 hours of audio.
They had a special privacy button that they could turn on to, you know.
To disable the whole thing.
Yeah, but they had these fisheye lenses in the ceilings, and they had all these microphones,
And they were recording the process of this one baby as he entered toddlerhood learning to talk.
And it’s just fascinating.
You can go online and find audio of, for example, a speeded-up version.
It takes about 40 seconds of the kid’s progress from saying gaga to water.
So you hear him learning to get it right.
Yes, compressed into 40 seconds.
So they’re going to do this for all of the things that he learns to do.
It’s not just what he talks about.
It’s how he behaves and all that other kind of stuff as well.
Well, it’s specifically language.
Okay, that’s what they’re interested in.
Yeah, they’re interested in how kids acquire language and talk about data.
I mean, they have so much data to crunch.
And so they’re doing all this cool stuff with rendering the data and twisting it different ways to mine information.
They figured out that by his second birthday, he knew 530 words.
Very good.
And they also found something really interesting, which was that when the child was close to mastering a word, like, say, water,
The parents or caregivers, whichever adults were around him, they ended up slowing down and really simplifying their sentences until the kid got the hang of it.
And then they talked normally again.
They did this naturally without even really thinking about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very good.
And I don’t know if other parents have noticed this pattern.
Yes.
We do this in our house.
My wife and I, she’s a linguist and I’m a lexicographer.
And, yeah, we trade glances over the head of my son when he says something approximately right.
And then we both, without thinking about it, repeat it a little slower.
Yeah, absolutely.
You absolutely do that.
That’s wonderful.
So my question is, is there going to be a movie from this, a book?
This is decades of research coming up, right?
Not to mention psychotherapy for the kid.
No, he’ll be fine.
No, yeah.
Did they name him Truman?
That’s the question.
I don’t know what they named him.
I mean, I think they were protective of the kid, really.
But it’s really fascinating to see the process of what this guy is calling word birth.
Call us with your language questions or your comments about language acquisition or words and phrases and how we use them.
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And the address is words@waywordradio.org.
