reliability, cueing, and neurotic parenting

Sat Mar 1 12:48:00 UTC 2008

I was intrigued by Kim's description of the LENA device and agree that we should not dismiss it out of hand (perhaps just be wary of how it's being promoted).  It sounds like a language equivalent of a pedometer that estimates how many steps people take in a day from their bouncing around.  One of the problems is that some of them keep counting when you're in a car that bounces around too.  I'm wondering if there was any validation research to look at how accurate the counting is under noisy conditions.

On a second note about the "Clever Hans" phenomenon, there is a difference here in that the horse was simply cued to stop stomping from the subtle movements of the trainer.  In the case of the infant videos you have qualitatively differentiated responses that don't seem to be cued to anything the adult is doing with his body.  If the word cards on the video are doing the cuing for the infant to touch it's body parts, then that's not really a case of a Clever Hans effect, because it's the relevant stimulus that's doing the cuing.  But the question again is whether we can say that the shapes of the words are actually acting as symbols in representing body parts for the infants in a non-iconic mode, even if they are not representing the phonetic values of the individual letters (which is why it presumably is not real reading per se).  Perhaps if young infants can learn things like baby signs, then maybe this should not be that surprising, although we generally think of the baby signs as being a bit more iconic in nature.  It might be interesting to see if infants can learn arbitrary baby signs as easily as iconic ones.  

Finally, even though there definitely is an unhealthy culture of competitive parenting, this doesn't mean that everyone who tries to extend the knowledge of their very young children is necessarily doing a bad thing.  We took great pleasure in marveling at what our daughter was able to pick up about language and number at a very early age "before she was supposed to".  I don't think we should be in the position of being educational Luddites and prescribe what the "natural" age is for any particular ability.  Consider the case of the Emperor Charlemagne, who considered it impossible that peasants could ever learn to read.  I think that it's fine if parents want to see what their kids can do; it just shouldn't turn in to a requirement.  But nowadays, when preschoolers have to be interviewed and tested for entry into kindergarten, it's pretty hard to stem that flow. 

Peter

Peter Gordon, Associate Professor
525 W 120th St. Box 180
Biobehavioral Sciences Department
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
Office Phone: (212) 678-8162
FAX: (212) 678-8233
Web Page: www.tc.edu/faculty/index.htm?facid=pg328

________________________________

From: info-childes at googlegroups.com on behalf of Kim Oller
Sent: Fri 2/29/2008 1:47 PM
To: Info-CHILDES
Subject: LENA

I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Infoture, Inc.,
which is the producer of LENA. Perhaps rather than responding to
specific interests and concerns that were expressed in the recent
postings, I'll just offer to talk with anyone who wants to know about
the company and the tools it has developed. Also I would encourage any
one who would like to talk with people at the company directly to do
so. These are very friendly and open people. Perhaps the most
appropriate contact would be Jill Gilkerson at 303 441 9014 or
JillGilkerson at infoture.org.

I wouldn't be involved if I didn't view the developments at Infoture
as extremely positive and indeed fundamentally important to our
futures, both scientific and clinical.  Infoture invested heavily to
develop a battery-powered recording device that weighs about an ounce
and yields good quality (16kHz) data for 16 consecutive hours. Further
they have developed extremely intriguing software that processes the
data to yield a variety of automatic measures -- in particular, pretty
reliable counts of adult words spoken in the sample, child
vocalizations, and conversational turns. Much more is on the way, and
the software itself is rapidly continuing to be improved and
enhanced.

These developments are going to be extremely useful for those of us
who are interested in large scale naturalistic sampling that can be
done all day long in the home. I am recording now with LENA and intend
to do longterm, longitudinal research using it, including research
employing neural network approaches that need really large quantities
of data. Infoture is not just developing devices -- they already have
over 40,000 hours of recording, much of it on a carefully stratified
longitudinal sample. This sample is going to be a tremendous resource
for research, and Infoture has done very significant research with it
already. Collaborators from a variety of universities are already
seeking to use the database for specialized projects, and Infoture is
making adaptations to encourage that kind of collaboration and
utilization of the data.

In part my enthusiasm about this is due to my belief that laboratory-
based research needs to be supplemented with large-sample naturalistic
research. I don't think it is likely that we will be able to process
really large samples without automated preprocessing. So the Infoture
efforts are laying infrastructure for critical research,

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