MIT researcher records the first three years of his child’s life.
April 27th, 2008
Recording every moment of their son’s first three years of life, MIT researcher Deb Roy and his wife hope to understand how children learn language. To do that he did what many parents do. He bought a video camera. Er… he actually bought eleven video cameras and 14 state-of-the-art microphones. He then connected these to five Apple XServes and 4.4 Terabytes of storage in order to record every waking moment of their son’s early life.
‘My ultimate goal is to understand how language works,’ Roy explains. ‘But for all of the interest in how children learn language, there’s no comprehensive data of even a single child’s development,’ Roy says. ‘Most researchers rely on speech recordings that cover less than 1.5 percent of a child’s complete linguistic experience.’
And that simply isn’t a dense or broad enough data set to answer the kinds of deep questions that Roy thinks are necessary to uncover the steady process of language acquisition. Truly understanding how human beings acquire language requires “stepping into a child’s shoes.”
Despite the Truman Show undertones, I find this utterly fascinating and not just from a technological standpoint. Language is the basis for human thought. We think in language, so understanding it’s acquisition in our formative years will be valuable in knowing us as a species.
It will take a while for them to parse the data, but I’ll be looking out for an update in the coming years. Read their profile on Apple’s website, here.
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