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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.’ Read the rest of this entry »
