Score: 9 balloonsThe MIT Media Labs Cognitive Machines Group's director Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with 11 videocameras and 14 microphones to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 7 million words spoken in 90,000 hours of home video to hear "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.
you will also like another TED talk "The linguistic genius of babies" http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html
ReplyDeleteIt talks of a similar experiment with more subjects - they found how 6-month-old babies "take statistics" of the sounds they hear on the course of learning a language. It's fascinating.