Soderstrom – recording studies

Over the last ten years there’s been a sort of a technology shift that has occurred that has changed the way that we think about understanding the language environment of infants. So in the past when we were studying what babies hear in terms of the speech input that they get, we would go into somebody’s home or they would come into the lab and we would record them going about as natural an experience as they can for, you know, an hour or something. And then we would take those back to the lab and you know, transcribe them or analyze them acoustically or something like that. But what happened about ten years ago now, little bit more, was the emergence of technology that would allow us to get a full day’s audio recording in people’s homes and then do some fairly automated analysis because you know, even getting a ten-hour recording isn’t really that helpful if you then have to transcribe ten hours because that takes a huge – that’s a huge investment. It could take as many as 20 hours to analyze, you know, an hour of recording or more depending on what you’re doing with it.  

So the development of, you know, better recording technology but also sort of more automated ways of processing the recordings has really expanded our ability to get a real window into infants’ real-world language experiences rather than this one hour snapshot where the mom is really attending to the fact that she’s in front of an audio or video recorder. Families can really go about their regular day and there really is some reason to believe that although they’re not unaware that they’re being recorded that they really can get to the point of being comfortable and really getting a real-world snapshot of those experiences. And one of the things that this allows us to do is then to compare different families both within certain communities and across communities and look at the variability both within communities and across communities in how – what are those experiences that infants have. And that can really be important for informing our theory about what is the relationship between what infants are hearing and what they’re understanding about language.