![]() Was I consciously doing that? I can't imagine anyone consciously doing that." "We're getting longer sentences when he doesn't know the word, and then they start getting shorter, and they're pretty much at their shortest as he starts to get the word. "For each of the primary caregivers we found the same trend," Roy said. ![]() "But when we plotted it, we didn't see it," Roy told in an interview. Roy and his team had logically hypothesized that if caregivers were attuned to a child’s language skills, they would begin communicating with the child in simple language that grew more complicated as the child showed signs of comprehension. ![]() In doing so they uncovered a surprising pattern in which caregivers would suddenly slip into simple language, then slowly move back into more complex sentence structures. The data is still being processed, but Roy provided a look at one surprise his team has discovered so far.īy collecting each instance in which his son heard a word and noting the context, they mapped all 530 words the boy learned by his second birthday. Since they stopped recording in 2008, Roy and his MIT team have transcribed more than 7 million words and created computer models to track the movements of his son and caregivers throughout the house over time and match them to language. The so-called Speechome project is the largest ever study of child language development in a natural or clinical environment, or as Roy calls it "the largest home video collection ever made.” With a number of privacy protections in place – including an "oops" button in each room that allowed family members to turn off cameras and mics during personal moments - they recorded an average of 10 hours a day, amassing 90,000 hours of video, or 200 terabytes of total data. ![]() Part of the goal was to determine how much influence place and context have on language acquisition. So in 2005, before his son was born, he and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones to capture every word the infant and his caregivers spoke and record the environment and events around which these utterances occurred. Roy, a cognitive scientist and director of MIT Media Lab's Cognitive Machines Group, wanted to understand how children assimilate and learn language in order to build robots that can learn as children do. "He sure nailed it, didn’t he!" said Roy at the end of the clip, as the audience laughed. ![]()
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