I wonder if criticisms of the sort voiced in this company might not
influence the subsequent course of inquiry. There are a bunch of critical
comments below the Roy
presentation that could benefit from this discussion.
mike
On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
On Mar 16, 2011, at 9:16 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
I am not entirely sure I agree with Martin's and Jim's criticisms.
First
of all, when I read Halliday's work on early language acquisition, it
seems
MORE objective than Deb Roy's "space time worms". Halliday is looking at
grammar and especially at function. But I am really not sure at all what
Deb
Roy is looking at. I can't even understand, when I am looking at the
worms,
what is space and what is time, but above all I can't understand how it
helps him organize his transcriptions. (I can see how it makes for a cool
presentation, though!)
Like Jim, I'd like to clarify my previous message. I didn't mean to sound
as though I were rejecting any use of technology for this kind of
research.
Obviously videorecording and other techniques of objectification are
crucial
for the study of a phenomenon as fleeting as speech. But any
investigation
of children's acquisition of language has to make use of the intuitions
of
speakers of that language. One needs to be able to recognize the legal
combinations of phonemes, and syllables, and the illegal combinations, in
order to plot the movement from one to the other. One needs to recognize
a
word, and approximations to it, and what it signifies in a specific
occasion
of use. The utility of computers, then, to help conduct an analysis of a
child's speech depends on ones ability to program them with the
equivalent
of these intuitions. The degree of success with which we have been able
to
program computers to recognize human speech is still very limited, and
our
ability to program them to understand context has been even more limited.
Yet once one collects massive amounts of data, as Roy has done, the use
of
computers becomes virtually unavoidable. My point about Halliday's
research
was that he drew not only on his speaker/hearer's intuitions, he also
drew
on what was available to him as a participant interacting intimately with
the child speaker. Roy of course had the same type of interactions, but
rather than build on these he chose instead the strategy of massive data
collection. There is, presumably as a consequence of, apparently no
attention to semantics in Roy's analysis - not that one would expect to
find
the child showing an understanding of concepts, but knowing something of
the
adults' interpretations of his words in context would surely be
tremendously
helpful in understanding the acquisition process.
I assume that the fact that in his presentation Roy could provide only
sound bites of the child's approximations to "water" indicates that his
system for automated analysis of the videos was not able to parse those
events. Was the computer able to judge these utterances to be tokens of a
single type? Or did humans still need to go through the recordings to
make
such judgments? If the latter, then it seems to me that the accumulation
of
massive amounts of data made the researchers' task more difficult, not
easier, and it is not clear to me what the benefit is of Roy's approach.
Martin __________________________________________
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