Deb Roy - "The Birth of a Word"

So on TED talks, there is a talk by Mr Roy himself, talking about his groundbreaking research that is called "The Speech-Home Project. In this talk, he goes on to explain what it was about and how he did it so it was about putting cameras up in every room in his house to record his sons speech and movement up to the age of 2. An interesting thing to pick up and is useful to the CLA part of the exam is known as the Caregiver Feedback Loop. This is about caregivers utterances and language spoken by the caregivers being restructures to converge into simple language for children to understand. This is the scaffolding for children to build up their language. So he shows his son going from "gaga" to water in 6 months due to this. A nice quote you can pull out from this is that Deb Roy compare language to a flower blossoming and the different stimuli that help to the flower to achieve its full potentional is what caregivers do to help stimulate a child's language. He goes on to explain different part of his experiment like how context is important for lexis and how they now have moved it in from the CLA aspect and onto looking at media coverage.

Here is the link: <iframe src="https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>