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Scientist Captures Son’s First 90,000 hou | ||
Tags: Scientific Research | Children | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 17 of 37 10 March 2011 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Kuikentje, a baby of that age doesn't have any concept of privacy at all. Just capturing the time on video and using a computer program to analyze the data doesn't hold any risk to harm for the child. Almost every family has some embarrassing stories, pictures of videos of their children, and the poor ones are the ones without, because it's most likely that nobody cared enough for them to remember such anecdotes.
I can understand that this reminds you of cruel experiments, but please believe me that in this case, it is not cruel to the child. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 18 of 37 10 March 2011 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most of our knowledge of infant language acquisition is from the observations of (mostly female) linguists on the development of their own children. One of the near-universals of all such observation is that the parents had grand plans about how to teach the child, but in the end, the child was the one in control.
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| draoicht Groupie Ireland Joined 6314 days ago 89 posts - 146 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 37 10 March 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
The talk is on the TED website now. Link 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 20 of 37 10 March 2011 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree, I am not concerned about the child's privacy nor do I think about good old Friedrich II. On the other hand I can't resist the temptation to mention the brilliant film "The Truman Show" and hope one will not stop at the very beginnings of language acquisition and instead keep shooting until the child is able to use metempsychosis, deoxyribonucleic acid or even some really challenging vocabulary and, of course, syntaxis. No, what I as a father would be really concerned about is the fact that it is difficult to behave in a natural way during the time of the experiment. Will I be the father I want to be, or does the experiment, well, the observation, change my attitude and behavior towards the child just as Heisenberg had, of necessity and by interference, a bad influence on the atoms he tried to investigate (agreed, a rather free interpretation, ignore it)? I don't know; as in other cases of scientific progress gained through dubious(?) means I will be grateful that others did the (potentially dirty) work for me. Edited by lingoleng on 10 March 2011 at 9:54pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 21 of 37 10 March 2011 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||
He should not only be concerned about that as a father but as a scientist as well. If the researcher himself plays an important role in the environment being investigated, that alone could have an impact on the outcome. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 37 10 March 2011 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
That's what Labov calls "the Observer's Paradox", and it's a well-known problem in academia. In general it's accepted that people eventually get used to the presence of recording equipment and eventually ignore it. When collecting natural conversations for a language corpus, for example, it's standard practice to record one group of people over 6 months or more. The first and last months will be automatically disregarded (because that's when people are most aware of the observation), and samples will be taken from the middle. I imagine the Roys would have essentially forgotten about the cameras long before the baby started producing genuinely meaningful sounds. Besides, Deb's own curiosity about the process would probably affected him more than the presence of the cameras.... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 23 of 37 15 March 2011 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I thoroughly enjoyed the video. It makes me wonder if we could do something similar with adults learning a second language.
Now I really wish I had recorded myself every step of the way learning Japanese. If someone like Benny who takes on different languages frequently and over a short period of time could tackle a project like that, it'd be so interesting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| PonyGirl Groupie United States Joined 5020 days ago 54 posts - 70 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 24 of 37 15 March 2011 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Sure the baby doesn't, but the kid will once it is old enough to understand that yes, dad did indeed record every moment of my early life to analyze how I acquired language. Not exactly something most loving doting parents are thinking about at the moment ;) Had my parents done that, yes it would make me feel incredibly weird, like I was a little test dummy for them to marvel over. It isn't the actual process that would weird me out, it's that the dad even had the desire to do it! Couldn't he just enjoy the beautiful experience of raising a kid? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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