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Alex was in another research study yesterday. This one was apparently tons of fun.
They're studying short-term memory. Previous studies have found that babies Alex's age have a short-term memory of about three items. So if you hide three items in a box and let them retrieve two, they'll keep searching for the third - but if you hide four items and only let them retrieve two, they may not realize that there are more in there. Adults' short-term memories can be assisted by "chunking" - grouping the information to be remembered in larger units. For example, it would be hard for most people to reproduce the letters
NYCFBILSDFDR
after only being exposed to them for a couple of seconds, but it would be relatively easy if the letters were presented as
NYC FBI LSD FDR
Babies are the same way. If they're presented with four identical toy cats which are then hidden in a box, they're more likely to keep searching until they find all of them than if they're given four totally different toys. The similarity of the items lets them chunk them together so there's less to remember.
This study was looking at the middle ground, where items are similar (four different toy cats, four different toy cars, or two cats and two cars) but not identical. The experimenter had a black box with an opening at one end shielded by two strips of Spandex. Alex could reach between the Spandex strips, but couldn't see in (although she certainly tried, by pulling one strip of Spandex way out and then peering in). The experimenter showed her the toy cats or cars, put them in the box, and then pushed the box forward to let Alex retrieve them. Unbeknownst to Alex, the experimenter was secretly holding two of the toys at the back of the box so that they were unretrievable. So she'd get the first two out, no problem, and then there would be a little pause to see if she kept searching.
Alex found the whole thing very exciting. She bounced and pointed when the toys were shown, reaching eagerly for the apparatus. After enough repetitions of the experimenter's rigid script ("Alex, look! Look! See this? See this?") she started pointing and saying "Look! Look!" herself. She also tried her best to re-hide the toys after she took them out of the box. (Hey, the experimenter kept putting them in the box, so obviously that was how you played with them!) I couldn't really tell how diligently she was searching for the unretrievable ones, and how the different experimental conditions affected her searching - that will be a matter for videotape coders.
She got a T-shirt and a fancy award certificate for participating. I was sorry to hear that they won't have any more studies for her until she's 28 months. Apparently they've found that research participants in the early toddler years are more trouble than they're worth.
New books she asks for by name: Where's my cow? ("Cow cow!"; a current obsession which may be demanded ten times a day), Splash! ("Spass!")
New words: cereal, bottle, truck, tree, squirrel, grapes, strawberries ("s'raw"), go, jeans (seems to apply to any pants or shorts with a fly front), shirt, down, yes, dark, yogurt, cracker, water, head, barrette, house, food, Cheerios, night (for "good night" or going to sleep), Zoe, neck (seems to specifically mean "necklace," applied both to my flaming chalice pendant and my parents' dog's collar), hot, thank you ("daysoo"), clap, Bill, pen. "Cow" and "splash" are also new words, but I don't know if she realizes they have any meaning beyond book titles. Mostly multisyllabic words are expressed as a single syllable, so yogurt becomes "yo" and barrette is "b'reh.".
New word for which I am probably going to hell: Tie-tie (meaning "tired"), courtesy of Cute Overload. I did not intend to deliberately teach Alex baby talk, I swear, but one day after her nap I couldn't resist saying, "Poor Alex, she's still so tie-tie." She immediately grinned at me and said "Tie-tie" - I think she's heard enough English that she could kind of tell that it wasn't a real word, just silliness. (The ability to recognize whether something is likely to be a word in your native language develops before actual understanding does.) And then she remembered it. A couple of days later she got me up very early in the morning, and I told her, "Mama's tired." "Tie-tie," she said, and grinned like a fool. Oops.
Edited to add: Here's the picture that forever added "tie-tie" to my vocabulary.
They're studying short-term memory. Previous studies have found that babies Alex's age have a short-term memory of about three items. So if you hide three items in a box and let them retrieve two, they'll keep searching for the third - but if you hide four items and only let them retrieve two, they may not realize that there are more in there. Adults' short-term memories can be assisted by "chunking" - grouping the information to be remembered in larger units. For example, it would be hard for most people to reproduce the letters
NYCFBILSDFDR
after only being exposed to them for a couple of seconds, but it would be relatively easy if the letters were presented as
NYC FBI LSD FDR
Babies are the same way. If they're presented with four identical toy cats which are then hidden in a box, they're more likely to keep searching until they find all of them than if they're given four totally different toys. The similarity of the items lets them chunk them together so there's less to remember.
This study was looking at the middle ground, where items are similar (four different toy cats, four different toy cars, or two cats and two cars) but not identical. The experimenter had a black box with an opening at one end shielded by two strips of Spandex. Alex could reach between the Spandex strips, but couldn't see in (although she certainly tried, by pulling one strip of Spandex way out and then peering in). The experimenter showed her the toy cats or cars, put them in the box, and then pushed the box forward to let Alex retrieve them. Unbeknownst to Alex, the experimenter was secretly holding two of the toys at the back of the box so that they were unretrievable. So she'd get the first two out, no problem, and then there would be a little pause to see if she kept searching.
Alex found the whole thing very exciting. She bounced and pointed when the toys were shown, reaching eagerly for the apparatus. After enough repetitions of the experimenter's rigid script ("Alex, look! Look! See this? See this?") she started pointing and saying "Look! Look!" herself. She also tried her best to re-hide the toys after she took them out of the box. (Hey, the experimenter kept putting them in the box, so obviously that was how you played with them!) I couldn't really tell how diligently she was searching for the unretrievable ones, and how the different experimental conditions affected her searching - that will be a matter for videotape coders.
She got a T-shirt and a fancy award certificate for participating. I was sorry to hear that they won't have any more studies for her until she's 28 months. Apparently they've found that research participants in the early toddler years are more trouble than they're worth.
New books she asks for by name: Where's my cow? ("Cow cow!"; a current obsession which may be demanded ten times a day), Splash! ("Spass!")
New words: cereal, bottle, truck, tree, squirrel, grapes, strawberries ("s'raw"), go, jeans (seems to apply to any pants or shorts with a fly front), shirt, down, yes, dark, yogurt, cracker, water, head, barrette, house, food, Cheerios, night (for "good night" or going to sleep), Zoe, neck (seems to specifically mean "necklace," applied both to my flaming chalice pendant and my parents' dog's collar), hot, thank you ("daysoo"), clap, Bill, pen. "Cow" and "splash" are also new words, but I don't know if she realizes they have any meaning beyond book titles. Mostly multisyllabic words are expressed as a single syllable, so yogurt becomes "yo" and barrette is "b'reh.".
New word for which I am probably going to hell: Tie-tie (meaning "tired"), courtesy of Cute Overload. I did not intend to deliberately teach Alex baby talk, I swear, but one day after her nap I couldn't resist saying, "Poor Alex, she's still so tie-tie." She immediately grinned at me and said "Tie-tie" - I think she's heard enough English that she could kind of tell that it wasn't a real word, just silliness. (The ability to recognize whether something is likely to be a word in your native language develops before actual understanding does.) And then she remembered it. A couple of days later she got me up very early in the morning, and I told her, "Mama's tired." "Tie-tie," she said, and grinned like a fool. Oops.
Edited to add: Here's the picture that forever added "tie-tie" to my vocabulary.
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...Please?
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But she does love Lucy the goddam Ladybird who sat on the blinking Leaf.
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Sounds like she's having fun with the testing, maybe you'll have to make some up during the intervening months.
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(Though my family can be unintelligible to outsiders; conversations like
-Where did I lost them, John?
-sur la table.
-oh right. Bainne, bitte.
-We have no klim, but there's mafu juice...
They make perfect sense to US. But it did confuse the hell out of Rob, first time my little sister came to stay.
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K.
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Or so it was explained to me by my friend Tori, whose 2-year-old, Max, learned to shout a hearty "fuck!" after a single exposure when mama stepped through the theretofore undiscovered rotten floorboard in their laundry room.
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My "oops I taught a child a word" was "stuff." There was a toddler wandering around my mom's house and she asked what was in the cabinets and I said "oh, just stuff." and... stuff became apparently not only the word of the day, but hte word of the week.
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Is there a name for that, besides just "chunking"? That really applies to my line of work (Information Architecture) because often software needs to give users a lot of information and we encourage this chunking to help that along. It's always nice to be able to pull out a psychology reference. Lends what we're saying a little more credence.
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Alex is really impressive at language!
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She is, yes, but it's also very interesting to me to see what isn't there - where the gaps are. Of her first 75 words, almost all of them are names. She almost exclusively uses them when the objects they represent are in front of her, or when someone else mentions them first.
So, like, when she wants a drink, she'll say "Cup?" if she actually sees one. Or if I ask her, "Do you want a drink of water from your cup?" she will say "Wa" (water) or "Cup" to ask for some. But she won't express thirstiness by asking for her cup out of the blue. She'll say "Dog!" if we see one, or hear barking, or find a dog picture in a book, but she doesn't talk about dogs when they're not around.
She doesn't have any way to tell us verbally that she's hungry, thirsty, bored, tired, or in pain. I really noticed that over the weekend, when she was exceedingly cranky. 75 words, and none of them suitable for answering the question "What's the matter?"
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And here I was looking forward to our own language explosion for just that reason. Bummer.
When E gets cranky now, I often say something to her like "Don't you want to start talking now, so you can tell me what's wrong?"
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Okay, this is *hilarious*.
Also, 'Spass' means 'fun' in German. Thought you should know. :-)
-J
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But strawberries? Does that mean that already Alex can eat things that you can't eat?
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She LOVES strawberries. Oh my God. The other day she threw her first ever grocery store tantrum, because she saw that I had strawberries in our basket and I told her we had to pay for them and wash them before we could eat them.
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"[massive sigh of endurance] . . . pants, pants, yes, I know."
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Do you have any idea if there's such a thing as a guide to birds commonly found in cities? Alex is so interested in birds, and I would love to be able to start using different names.
Actually, what I'd really like is a general naturalist's guide to cities, with common urban plants, animals, insects, and birds. But birds are kind of the topic du jour for Alex.
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764126873/qid=1149800606/sr=1-68/ref=sr_1_68/104-1122743-6315106?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
The only thing you'll have that's not in here is the raptors in the skyscrapers.
I also have this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764126873/qid=1149800606/sr=1-68/ref=sr_1_68/104-1122743-6315106?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
which covers the whole DCMDVA area.
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Clearly a child of taste and discernment! It's never too early to become a rabid Terry Pratchett fan.
I can certainly see how how after ten times a day, even Pratchett could start to pall, though. :)
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(Anonymous) 2006-06-12 01:21 pm (UTC)(link)