Scientist Records First 5 Years of His Son's Life, Analyzes Language Development

jamie tips a story about MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy, who started a project five years ago, upon bringing his newborn son home from the hospital, to record his family's movement and speech inside their house. Since then, Roy has used various techniques to analyze and distill the 200 terabytes of raw data into useful and interesting visualizations. "For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word — like 'water' — was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the 'word birth,' something remarkable happened. 'Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.' In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn." Roy also compiled videos showing each time his son used certain words over a period of many months, clearly illustrating how those parts of the child's linguistic capabilities evolved over time.

Comments

"Unconsciously stress?"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences.

As a father of three I can tell you that this behavior isn't "unconscious.". When your kids start to say words you will spend hours and then days saying them back to your children, to confirm what they said, to model better enunciation and to just to keep them engaged in a conversation with you. The words "by itself" bit is obvious - "affel" means either "I see an apple" or "I want a piece of your apple"; coaxing more out of your child at first would be torture and lead to frustration. "In short sentences" is also obvious - you wouldn't start your 18-month-year-old with long sentences.

Is there a story here or is this just a way for a guy to spend five fun years with his kid while drawing a paycheck?

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[Marc_Hawke]

I'm pretty sure he meant 'instinctive' rather than 'unconscious.' Famously, your baby did NOT come with a manual that told you when to simplify your sentences to help him learn. I'm not sure where the line between 'common sense' and 'instincts' is, or whether we're just doing what we've seen other people do (i.e. learned, but not necessarily taught.)

Whatever you call it, however, 'unconscious' is definitely the wrong word.

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[suso]

I'm also a father and can say that this is one of the things I was most curious about. How kids learn to start talking. There really is a lot of trial and error at first and it takes a while before kids say anything intelligible. Parents of course become good at decoding what kids want.

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[chill]

Your post is an anecdote. He collected data. This is a story, and there an important difference.

As for not being obvious about the short sentences... with my youngest son (4th child, now 20 months old), I made the conscious decision not only "no baby talk", but talk in full sentences just like I do to adults.

I may say things 3 different ways, as well as point, draw and demonstrate but I still talk in normal adult-level conversation. You know, one step above PC tech support. :-)

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[Meddik]

You didn't get the Manual? Heck, you can download it on PDF now!

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[wierd_w]

The raw videos are data. The subjective recollections on the events that were recorded are anectdotes. One depicts real events, the other does not.

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[ender-]

As for not being obvious about the short sentences... with my youngest son (4th child, now 20 months old), I made the conscious decision not only "no baby talk", but talk in full sentences just like I do to adults.

We basically did the same thing with my daughter, now almost 6 years old. We never used baby talk [no 'baba' or 'wawa', always 'bottle' and 'water]. From day one we would talk to her constantly. We would explain every detail of everything we did in full sentences. Sure, we'd often use the high-pitched baby-talk cadence and tone [kids do respond to that and learn better from it], but always in full sentences .

The end result? Well, she didn't start talking particularly early, but she did move into complex sentences and ideas well before her peers. By the *beginning* of Kindergarten she was reading at a 2nd grade level with full comprehension, and able to get gist of most 3rd grade level stuff and higher. She has an amazing grasp of language. As an example, in the first month of her Kindergarten class, her teacher was walking them through the hallways. The teacher was asking the students not to look into the open doors of other classrooms. The teacher struggled to find the right word when she told them that the other classes might find it 'disturbing'. My daughter immediately pipes up and corrects her, saying, "Actually, I think you mean 'distracting'."

I'm no child development expert by any stretch of the imagination, but that strikes me as an amazing grasp of a very subtle difference in wording for a 5 year old to not only recognize, but immediately come up with the better word.

We still use complex sentences when we speak with her, and make a point to pull out all the stops with the vocabulary we will use with her. She's very good about stopping us and asking us what a word means if there's one she doesn't understand.

The downside to all of this is that she thinks most of her classmates are idiots, but frankly, she needs to learn to interact with people of differing abilities so she'll have to get over it. ;)

Now we just need to work on her math skills...

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[Lemmy Caution]

Now we just need to work on her math skills...

You may have jinxed yourself a bit. Cultivating precocity in one dimension seems to delay and sometimes restrict development in others. Especially during the most plastic periods of brain development, when there is almost a "neural arms races" to recruit "real estate" for different fluencies, abilities etc. The best advice, if you want a well-rounded child, is simply to allow the process to go on naturally, prodding for extra effort to get over occasional hurdles. Having educated "cognitively engineered super-babies, I think one does a child few favors by pushing for precocity. In fact, there are signs that it can be counter-productive, when the natural momentum of the early start is exhausted and they have to start "working" at it again.

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[Nadaka]

Note: Most of those tutorials are for custom models with aftermarket parts. Factory models usually provide a lot fewer options. And even then, the order of operations may not be productive.

Re:"Unconsciously stress?"

[bluefoxlucid]

Maybe if we didn't teach kids to be retarded, they wouldn't be so shitty. I fucking hate children, but I find small asian kids unbelievably disturbing. Every child I meet is a retarded asshole... but the little chinese/japanese kids are like 3 years old, they're quiet, polite, they watch what they do, they get the fuck out of your way, and they don't touch your shit because it's there and they wanna get their grabby hands on it. WTF? It's unbelievably creepy. These are not the kids I'm used to.

We're doing something wrong. Seriously.

Another slashdot infomercial...

[bigsexyjoe]

Okay, he recorded his child. Has he made a theoretical breakthrough? Not much of one mentioned in the article. All it says is.. surprise, surprise... this guy is starting a new company he wants to promote. And it is based on this incredible software that this article doesn't really explain to us.

Re:Another slashdot infomercial...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I for one think that any decent software that can parse that amount of data into any kind of useful and repeatable refined data is interesting.
Especially if it does the vocal analysis automatically... It could be very interesting to analyze peoples speech patterns in any number of social interactions.
I'm not sure it would be GOOD science but fun?

Lets for instance say we have 4 IT admins hanging by the watercooler and the really hot intern walks by and shows his stuff off. Yes, his. I work in a female dominated workplace and they are just as bad as us guys, theyre just a little more discreet about it.

Very Cool

[Stenchwarrior]

It's amazing to watch a human learn the art of speech. I wish I had begun recording at my daughter's first sounds and continued while they evolved into the full sentences she carries on now at three years old. Unless you have a chronicle of such events it's hard to remember when they could only say a few words, especially when it's hard to get them to stop talking long enough to eat dinner. Even as parents the speech patterns change as the child is old enough to understand and repeat...although there's not much funnier than hearing a toddler say "goddamnit", or "son of a bitch" - I think that's the entire premise that South Park was built on.

Useful data

[Animats]

This is very useful data. We're going to know considerably more about how language really works once this is analyzed.

A few more people need to do this, for comparison and confirmation. It also needs to be done for a tonal language, like Chinese.

Fuck 'em!

[Onuma]

Generally speaking...that IS how babies are born.

How I see the process

[Abstrackt]

I think we always learn languages the same way, the only difference between a baby and an adult learning is that the baby doesn't have a first language to fall back on so their need to learn to communicate is greater.

Watching my first kid learn to speak was like watching myself try to learn Spanish. First, was total immersion and a complete lack of understanding. Eventually, there were attempts at copying the sounds; these attempts eventually led into attempts at forming words. Once the vocabulary reached a certain level words got combined to form simple sentences with noises and pointing to fill in the rest. From there, you're relatively close to having a full conversation.

Re:How I see the process

[darksideofmoon]

I'm taking an introductory Psych class and I just finished up a chapter on Language Acquisition. A note on how you saw mirrors of yourself learning Spanish and your first child:

After a child is first born, they are actually able to hear all sounds made by all languages, and that incessant babbling (you can tell I don't have kids) is actually something all babies do and reflect all the sounds of all languages in the world. These babbling sounds are made up of "phonemes", the simplest amount of sound. I've seen a few comments here poo-pooing this video as a waste of time and only a way to promote his business, but it actually reveals something interesting: all babies babble all the phonemes in the world, and they do it in the same order, which is remarkable. A baby in China babbles in the same pattern that an American child babbles.

Once the child begins to hear the words of their parents mother tongue, they begin to lose the phonemes of other languages. So much so, that they (and adults too), can't even hear other phonemes. For instance, a Japanese-native speaker can't pronounce the letter "L". It comes out as an "R" sound. However, if that same person was grown up in an American family, they would be able to speak that "L" sound.

So back to your Spanish learning, there may be some sounds in the language that you can't possibly hear or say, because the phonemes of the language were "removed" from your comprehension way back when you were a child.

I believe I have that all correctly. I haven't got back the results from my midterm that I just had the other day, and I may have crashed and burned this comment.

correlation not causation

[lkcl]

whilst this is interesting, it is a statistical sample of one family and one family only, albeit a rather long sample. we do not, for example, "modify our sentence structure to repeat more frequently words when immediately learned", but we do find ourselves using words which we know that baby lilyana now knows, in order to more include her in our day-to-day lives: there's a subtle difference.

one clarification: the article seems to be pointing out that it is through speech that the child "trains" the adults (not the other way round), the possible mistaken implication being that it is exclusively by speech that children get their adults to adapt to them. in fact, children do a hell of a lot more than use words to get their adults to do their bidding!

as lilyana is 23 months, we will be leaving it another 6 months or so for her to basically do as she pleases, when she pleases, with us supporting her at every step, so that she gets a chance to see how the world works _without_ being made massively and irrevocably insecure or limited by "no" [except when it's dangerous!].

babys/LSI/w+dog; prepping since forever for this

[Anonymous Coward]

the time for 'words' is shrinking? see you at the play-dates. be there or be scared.

we do have some intentions;

1. DEWEAPONIZATION (not a real word, but they like it) almost nothing else good happens until some progress here.

2. ALL BABYS CREATED/TO BE TREATED, EQUALLY. (a rough interpretation (probably cost us. seems like a no-brainer but they expressed that we fail on that one too(:)->) 'we do not need any 300$ 'strollers', or even to ride in your smelly cars/planes etc..., until such time as ALL of the creators' innocents have at least food, shelter, & some loving folks nearby.' again, this is a deal breaker, so pay attention, that's cheap enough, & could lead to our survival?

3. THOU SHALT NOT VACCINATE IRRESPONSIBLY. this appears to be a stop-gap intention.

the genuine feelings expressed included; in addition to the lack of acknowledgment of the advances/evolution of our tiny bodies/dna (including consciousness & intellect), almost nobody knows anymore what's in those things (vaccines) (or they'd tell us), & there's rumor much of it is less than good (possibly fatal) for ANY of us. if it were good for us we'd be gravitating towards it, instead of it being shoved in our little veins, wrecking them, & adversely affecting our improving immune systems/dna/development? at rite-aid, they give the mommies 100$ if they let them stick their babys with whoknowswhat? i can see why they're (the little ones) extremely suspicious? they're also asking that absolutely nobody be allowed to insert those corepirate nazi 'identity' 'chips' in their tiny frames. they know who they, and we, are, much better than we ever will? many, oddly? have fading inclinations to want to be reporters of nefarious life threatening processes, ie. 'conspiracies', as they sincerely believe that's 'stuff that REALLY matters', but they KNOW that things are going to be out in the open soon, so they intend to put their ever increasing consciousness, intellect, acute/astute senses & information gathering abilities, to the care & feeding of their fellow humans. no secrets to cover up with that goal.

4. AN END TO MANUFACTURED 'WEATHER'.

sortie like a no-(aerosol tankers)-fly zone being imposed over the whole planet. the thinking is, the planet will continue to repair itself, even if we stop pretending that it's ok/nothing's happening. after the weather manipulation is stopped (& it will be) it could get extremely warm/cold/blustery some days. many of us will be moving inland..., but we'll (most of us anyway) be ok, so long as we keep our heads up. conversely, the manufactured 'weather' puts us in a state of 'theater' that allows US to think that we needn't modify our megaslothian heritage of excessiveness/disregard for ourselves, others, what's left of our environment etc...? all research indicates that spraying chemicals in the sky is 100% detrimental to our/planet's well being (or they'd talk to US about it?). as for weather 'extremes', we certainly appear to be in a bleeding rash of same, as well as all that bogus seismic activity, which throws our advanced tiny baby magnets & chromosomes into crisis/escape mode, so that's working? we're a group whose senses are more available to us (like monkeys?) partly because we're not yet totally distracted by the foibles of man'kind'. the other 'part' is truly amazing. we saw nuclear war being touted on PBS as an environmental repair tool (?depopulation? (makes the babys' 'accountants' see dark red:-(-? yikes. so what gives? thanks for your patience & understanding while we learn to express our intentions. everybody has some. let us know. come to some of our million baby play-dates. no big hurry? catch your breath. we'll wait a bit more. thanks.

do the math. check out YOUR dna/intentional healing potential. thanks again.

Re:Dunstan Baby

[ender-]

Or you can teach them basic sign language, which the baby is able to do well before they are capable of speech. It's great having a baby who rarely cries because they can make their needs known instead of just screaming until you manage to figure out the problem through trial and error.

Here is the better link

[juggledean]

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8127804.stm 2009 BBC link The input filter cut our the url and tthe html in the parent, sorry about that

The Guy Needs To Get A Facebook Account

[pandrijeczko]

...because everyone I know with a baby or toddler spends their *WHOLE* time either updating their status about it or putting up *YET MORE* photos of it.

I don't wish harm to anyone or any kid on this planet but I just wish these people would GET A FUCKING LIFE outside their kids sometimes because it is FUCKING BORING!