Deb Roy: The birth of a word

Summary (Deb Roy: The birth of a word)

In his lecture “The birth of a word” Deb Roy talks about how thanks to an experiment that he, his family and a group of scientist made, they have now a better understanding of how the linguistic learning process work. This experiment consisted on having some kind of surveillance system during five years to record his life focusing on the growing process of his son. The main purpose in this project was to understand how social environments can affect the words that we learn when we grow up and the way we learn them. Roy and his group of scientist use the videos that they record to graphic the linguistic learning progress of Roy's son. By this process they made a map of the first words that his son learned. Then they compare this map with the environment that surround his son in his growing up process. Thanks to all the data that Roy and his team collect now there is a better understanding of how words are learned and how the environment affect this process. Roy and his team also made an incredible discovery. They linked this complex process to how media in the United States shape people and vise versa. to conclude roy mentions that in this high tech world is becoming easier to collect and analyze data on how the society works. (225 words)

Response (Deb Roy: The birth of a word)

In my opinion, Roy’s lecture in very interesting because it show us how technology has improved a lot in the latest years. He also show us how we can use that technology to have a better understanding of the things that surround us. One of the things that I like the most is how they graphic the worm that we create in space and time. I like this ideas because if we look at today's world, technology has became a necessary part of our lives which has its pros and its cons. In this case we see the pros because thanks to the technology development we can understand better many things, being that way easier to help other. A really god example of this is medicine, where we can use many technological methods to help people and do procedures that were seem as something impossible in the past such as transplants. (151 words)