Studying the birth of words

My daughter, Violet, is two years old and she’s learning words faster than a wildfire spreads through dry brush.  Some words I can tell she picks up from me and her dad, others I can tell she’s gleaned from Nick Jr, like the time she counted to five in Spanish while I sat their gaping like a fish out of water.  Still, a lot of the time I can’t figure out where she’s learned stuff from.

Recently, she’s taken to saying “of course” all the time.  As in, Hey Violet, are you hungry?  Of course!  Violet, want to read a story?  Of course!  It’s a kick in the pants, but the origin remains unknown.

That’s why a study conducted by two parents/scientists caught my eye.  The couple are speech and cognitive scientists respectively.  They wanted to study how a child learns language  comprehensively and naturally, since most theories on language acquisition were grounded in surprisingly incomplete observational data.

Deb Roy’s academic work involves teaching machines to learn and speak and says a data-based understanding of language development is crucial.  As his wife studies speech disorders they decided to create a really big study that coincided with the birth of their son.

Their version of nesting consisted in wiring their home with microphones and cameras in the hope they’d capture all verbal and non-verbal interactions between their son and his caregivers (both parents and the nanny) and understand the contextual environment around his language development.

After taping for three years they had over 200,000 hours of audio and video, as Roy says, “history’s biggest home video collection. Captured in this rich record are countless memorable moments for my family, from my son’s first steps to the arrival of his sister and beyond.”

Then the hard part:  transcribing several million words of speech:

…one of the first magical glimpses we got into the data was the acoustic equivalent of a time-lapse video of a flower blossoming. We were able to hear the evolution of a word form as my son transitioned from saying “gaga” to “water.”

The effect of this audio time lapse was striking, allowing us for the first time to hear the trajectory of a spoken word by accelerating through months of child development in seconds.

The study is yet to be completed, but Roy says their ability to trace the birth of words like “water” back to larger social contexts will help them pinpoint and study when, where and how language is acquired.

Roy believes the research may have profound implications on challenges as diverse as the “education” of cognitive robots and other machines, and advance our understanding and treatment of disorders that effect children’s development of communication and related social skills.

Click here to watch video from the study and listen to Deb Roy discuss the birth of a word.

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