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

Amazing technology and computer work. But keep in mind the old saw Mike likes to repeat about the man looking for his keys not where he dropped them, but under the street lamp - because the light is better. Even with amazing technology like this, researchers will only tend to look where things they expect to be true are visible, audible and quantifiable.
One of many questions, this one about the featured discovery: what happens to children where the adults and/or older children **don't** slow down as the infant learns a new word? Is that really a significant factor?
Besides the vexing ethical and potential legal issues, this kind of study strikes me as fairly expensive, both in hardware and labor, not to mention creative programming. As for legalities, I can just see a prime time law show now ... some 9 year-old twins and their grandparents file a civil suit against the scientist parents ...
Still, the study makes one curious. On the theory side, Vygotsky's ideas could be very helpful in this kind of study, and this kind of study could shed some new light on Vygotsky's theory.
Vygotsky talks about the child not being able to differentiate at first between their impressions of objects and the objects themselves, and between a word and its phonemic structure. These abilities must be acquired, and are great accomplishments. Slowing down one's speech around selected words may help the child focus on making both kinds of differentiation. I got the impression the child was being specifically coached on how to pronounce wa-ter in the final sequences. The applied discovery of two principles, the principle of object-relatedness, that "things have names" and the principle of phonemic imitation, that one can imitate the vocal sounds of others, seem to be two discovery threads that came together when the child finally said "water." Quite the moment.
For a while it seemed as though the child was oscillating between a version of 'gaga' and a version of 'water,' and then finally got the idea that one was preferred - and perhaps that a successful imitation would be rewarded. That was my impression. I wonder if the reward at first was "I get to splash this stuff all around when I say this stupid new word for gaga!" Like Mike, the video raised a lot of intriguing questions for me. For example, what did the next 100 attempts at "water" sound like - did the child keep experimenting with "gaga" or stick only with "water," and did the child use "gaga" and perhaps "water" for other meanings? Vygotsky's analysis, based on empirical evidence at the time from researchers documenting their own infant's first words, would predict the child probably did use that first word for multiple meanings, as a complex. Did the evidence in this study bear Vygotsky's analysis out? Would others like it reveal the use of first words as complexes? And did the pace and merging of these two principles accelerate as the child accumulated more words? I think the scientist said the child had a vocabulary of 503 words at the time he was preparing this report. Did the child appropriate these words more and more quickly? Or, if the pace was uneven, what might be some of the factors involved in the variations? If Vygotsky's identification of these two principles is correct, the child's learning curve should have generally accelerated as the child began to master in a practical way the principles of object relatedness and phonemic imitation. That would be an interesting hypothesis to test. I was glad to hear that the project was specifically interested in the relationship of words to events and objects. There are lots of other Vygotsky- and CHAT-inspired questions that could be asked, including about the roles of different kinds of artifacts, as Mike mentions. Part of what this team of researchers will do will likely depend on where the street lamps are - that is, on what quantities, spatial relations etc. are available to them that they think they can create meaningful statistical data from - and what they think is meaningful in the first place. And perhaps, what kinds of suggestions are made to them, and by whom.
Another area of an entirely different nature that has my curiosity is over how the boy and his younger sister will get along as they get older, and what studies like this might be able to reveal about what influences sibling relations. However, the ethical problems will probably preclude such a study. Should we endorse a 7-year-old and 4- year-old "consenting" to having their playing, fighting etc. videotaped for science hours every day? Should parents have the right to force them to consent - or have the right to consent for them? Up to what age? I am inclined to be opposed to such invasiveness of children on principle, even if the scientific aspect intrigues me. Videotaping consenting adults is another matter. We'll see what universities, courts, etc. do with this one. So - does this mean that we may have to settle for mass statistical analyses of TV shows and internet blogs to try to figure out how people really behave? LOL 

- Steve


On Mar 14, 2011, at 8:28 PM, mike cole wrote:
Interesting digital beams for mediational theorists to travel along, Jay.
No one has said what they learned about acquiring a productive use of a proper "water" starting with gaa. I thought that the totally uneven, shakey, comings and goings of bits and pieces, that finally fell into place, "the 
creation of the internal plane of the word" perhaps (?), was very
interesting.
It missed a lot I wanted to know, but it also directed my questioning, and 
if Roy does not go into Military of Industrial espionage, ,interesting
questions should be answerable; we saw nothing of the multiple threads of other people and artifacts in the flow and they were crucial in lots and 
lots of ways.
The visualization of the mediated interactions constituting American life 
embodied in discourse in digitially mediated activity, was also pretty
amazing.
The rest is just a different face of the disasters, of such amazing variety, that are besetting people at the moment. I wonder what the global mediated 
discourse looks like?
mike

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
Another page that may be a quicker way in to the relevant parts of this 
work is:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>

Professor Emeritus
City University of New York







On Mar 14, 2011, at 6:44 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:
People interested in a related approach to media analysis using computers
to find patterns in large video and image databases might look at the work of Lev Manovich, author of the Language of New Media, whose background is more in experimental art video, and later in communication and media theory. 
He is now at UCSD, see:


http://manovich.net/cultural-analytics/

under Recent Posts and the Cultural Analytics keyword heading.
I have found his work on TV news programs, film styles, and the manga 
fascinating.


JAY.


Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>

Professor Emeritus
City University of New York







On Mar 14, 2011, at 6:41 AM, Michael Lithgow wrote:
It's my first time contributing to this listserv, but if I can add to 
the

wonder being expressed about how this technology might effect media

research
- I think the potential for studying how news frames emerge, transform 
over
time, compete and slowly solidify into shared understandings is also 
exciting.  To be able to watch in something like real time the

discursive

ebb and flow of popular negotiation for hegemonic understanding is
remarkable.

Michael Lithgow
PhD Candidate, Carleton University
School of Journalism and Communication
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote: 


Thanks, Peter. Someone also posted on this to the local LCHC group

list,

and I replied with the following after watching the video (a TED
presentation):

Yes, this is pretty amazing. I was reminded of the work that Lev

Manovich

is doing here at UCSD on cultural analytics, trying to identify

quantitative
patterns in large amounts of video and image data, such as changing 
patterns
in news programs as to how much focus there is on the presenter vs the 
content, the rise of digital content backgrounds, etc.

But the MIT group has taken this much further, particularly in
cross-linking television content to online commentary by viewers in 
real
time. This should be the end of the Nielsen ratings, if they weren't 
gone
already, but its also potentially the end of the survey industry as 
well --
why do phone surveys of hundreds when you can get real time reactions 
from
millions. I can see the news shows commissioning this for "spin" on 
major
events, speeches, maybe the 2012 election. And this may be worrying, 
because

it has an inherent tendency, esp. at the current level of the

technology (re
semantic analysis) to grossly over-simplify what are in fact much more 
complex meanings being created.

I am happy to see the work on context factors, social input and

settings,
in the work on language development in the home. It's Gregory Bateson 
meets
massively parallel computing (GB did some of the first in-home filming 
of
his daughter's first years). But in relying on very simple indices, 
like
utterance length, it's again going to oversimplify. I don't think they 
can
analyze at this point just how the setting and the dialogue, over more 
than
one turn, scaffolds a sense of meaning for the child. Much easier of 
course
to trace the growth of phonology and single word acquisition. Still 
it's a

good step.

Quite fascinating to see something Ivan and I were predicting last

year:
people getting used to multi-video displays, where in this case you see simultaneous video across about 6 rooms in the house in 6 video views, 
and
then all the tv/cable channels at once, dozens of small video displays 
in a

giant array. How to see this? Of course their visual magic of

re-rendering

this into a 3D fly-through view of the whole house eliminates the
simultaneity in favor of sequentiality, and some neuroscience work

suggests
that we are best at doing sequential pattern recognition. But even a multi-video view can appear sequential to the brain when it is visually scanned in real time by the eyes' movements and attention focusing.
Every other word he says is about privacy concerns, but you still can't disguise the Big Brother potential here: total panopticon surveillance, video and audio, 24/7 in private as well as public settings. In the UK 
there

are already serious concerns being raised about access to the

ubiquitous
outdoor security cam footage, massively increased in the last 10 years everywhere in the country, as it leaks from the anti-terrorism units 
for
whose use it was originally justified to local police departments, etc. Combining this with effective video and semantic pattern recognition 
algorithms presents a real danger to privacy and freedom.

Tis a good wind that blows no ill.

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <

http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>


Professor Emeritus
City University of New York







On Mar 11, 2011, at 12:30 PM, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned
language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every 
moment
(with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home 
video

to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich

research

with deep implications for how we learn.


http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html
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--
Michael A Lithgow
514.983.1965

PhD Candidate, School of Journalism and Communication
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Research Associate, OpenMedia.ca

Contributing Editor, ArtThreat.net <http://www.artthreat.net>
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