Re: [xmca] Deb Roy: The birth of a word

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Thank you Lauren for that.  He has an amazing number of publications and not
that many of the corpus at hand.  He's a cognitive scientist, that's clear,
which puts him a little to the right of xmca, but boy do they have
conferences and journals :-)

Carol

On 19 March 2011 19:26, Lauren Zentz <laurenzentz@gmail.com> wrote:

> With all due respect to all the brilliant minds on this list and in this
> discussion, I have been following along here and there since this
> conversation started and wondering the entire time exactly what research
> and
> knowledge implications we should be worried about based on a 20 minute TED
> Talk.  It seems that for us as researchers it is very important to know
> what
> Roy is doing with language acquisition and development research, and who
> will be buying which ideas that he puts forth; but I feel like the intended
> message of his talk, which was given to a *very* broad, and generally
> non-linguist, non-cognitivist, and non-social scientist audience, was
> basically to demonstrate how amazing are the technological tools he is
> using
> to do this research, and to generally inspire a larger population of
> listeners regarding how complex and precious is the nature of human
> (language) development.
> I wonder if maybe, if we want to discuss the implications of his research,
> those of us interested could take a look at the actual publications he has
> written, where he has published them, and what audiences read them:
> http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/publications/index.html.
>
> Lauren Zentz
> Doctoral Candidate, Language, Reading and Culture
> College of Education, University of Arizona
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 9:48 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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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