LD Blog

Here’s an interesting research project: Equip a house with a host of highly sensitive audio-video recording devices that pipe the data into cluster of high-powered computers which have an array of very capacious storage devices. Using this system, document the language environment in which a child is raised and record the child’s language development. Pretty nifty, hunh? A petabyte of developmental data!

This is, in fact, what a couple of parents—Deb Roy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge, MA, US) and Rupal Patel (Northwestern; Boston, MA, US)—have been doing for the past few years.

The high-powered academic couple—he directs of the Cognitive Machines Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, and she directs the Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory at Northeastern University—scrambled to convert their suburban Boston home into a state-of-the-art research center that would host the most ambitious study ever conducted on how children acquire language. They named the linguistic data-mining odyssey the Human Speechome Project (HSP), a marriage between “Speech” and “Home.”

Why’s this relevant for LD Blog? Well, other research (especially Hart and Risley’s excellent work as summarized in Meaningful Differences, but note that there are many related studies in the research literature) has shown that differences in language environments have substantial effects on children’s language (e.g., vocabulary). Many Learning Disabilities are associated with problems in language (e.g., low phonological awareness, atypical syntax, problems in morphology, poor pragmatics). Understanding the language environment in which children develop their language skills might help explain some of the problems we see among children with Learning Disabilities.

Am I blaming parents? Nope. Language experiences that some children have may actually have protective effects. But, some experiences apparently are predictive of later outcomes. It would be good to know.

Am I saying that Learning Disabilities are environmental, that they have no biological components? Nope. I’m not saying that they do or do not have biological features. But, imagine that there are biological predispositions and that some language environments prevent or mitigate the manifestation of disability. That would be worth knowing, I’d say.

To complete a project examining the contribution of language environments to Learning Disabilities would require a prospective longitudinal study of substantial size. Supposing that Learning Disabilities appear in 5% of the population, then to get a enough children with Learning Disabilities to make the study reasonably sensitive, one would need 2000 families; at 5 per 100, that would yield about 100 children with Learning Disabilities. Now, if one were clever, she would look for families where there were siblings so that one could also examine the shared and non-shared environments, and start to factor in the contribution of genetic factors.

Imagine the financial cost of such a study….

If you could have a switch that would stop the recording at any time, would you agree to have such a system record your interactions with your newborn all the way through toddlerhood?

Meanwhile, to learn more about the Human Speechome Project, check these resources:

• Science magazine from 2006 ;
• Images from the MIT School of Architecture;
• Press release about the computing environment from Apple;
• Listing of multiple sources from the MIT press folks.