In-home study suggests babies learn to talk more from context then repetition
Medical Xpress | Bob Yirka | September 22, 2015
A small team of researchers affiliated with MIT and Stanford’s Department of Psychology has conducted a very unusual experiment—they have recorded every utterance of a single child as he learned to talk and then used the video to undertake a novel study meant to better understand how we humans learn to speak to other people. They have detailed what they learned in a paper they have had published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Abstract
Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary.
