Hello, dear long-lost readers! So much for my ambitious 2024 goal of posting 2-4 times per month. Half-way through last year my life went into overdrive, and it’s been Linguamonium hiatus ever since. (This “overdrive” consisted of, in the space of a few months: getting a new job, moving twice within 30 days, buying our first house, getting pregnant, and finally, having our town wrecked by Hurricane Helene.) Dealing with the aftermath of such pearls of fate left me, sadly, with little time for personal writing. Now, with a scant few days of maternity leave before dependent #2 arrives on the scene, here is my blog post offering…
Introduction to the project
Since my son turned two and became capable of answering basic questions verbally, I’ve embarked upon an informal, single-subject, longitudinal language acquisition project (see onesie) – what I’m calling “Ryden’s audio timelapse”.
My basic goal was to capture audio recordings of little “interviews” between me and my son Ryden, every 6 months (around his birthday each year and every half-year thereafter), starting at age 2 until he was at least 5 years old. I asked the same basic questions every time, and recorded my son’s answers within the context of our interactions.
The ultimate intention was to string these recordings together into “audio timelapses” (or “audio-lapses”) – an aural analogy to time-lapse photography.
It hasn’t been a rigorous experiment in any sense, as I formulated no hypotheses, and had no exact scientific aim. I simply wanted to gather interesting material to study, thought the collection process would be fun, and figured my offspring might enjoy this unique record of his linguistic beginnings when grown. (His appreciation of me sharing this record far and wide across the internet is a less-sure bet, but beyond the intimate personal details Gen Z already shares globally on a daily basis, humans will probably have their entire consciousnesses uploaded to the cloud before my son gets his driver’s license, so it’s all good. Anyway, I digress.)
Some details and a first recording
I recorded audio only, as opposed to audio along with video, for a couple of reasons:
- Easier to capture discretely by phone, without my son realizing it (especially as he got older), avoiding anything potentially like the Hawthorne Effect
- For the final results, easier to focus solely on the language – its quality and changes – versus the many other dimensions of change that would be observable visually
I have been fascinated by this “audio-lapse” idea, hoping it would provide a goldmine of rich linguistic data. Language changes might be observed along all of the linguistic dimensions: phonetic/phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic.
Now that the project is “complete” (although I may actually continue it for another year or three), my plan is to post the audio-lapses here – organized by question, one per post. The questions/categories are:
- Names and age
- Numbers
- Colors and shapes
- Favorite foods
- Toys
- Books
I’ll share some of my observations in future pieces, but for this first one, I’d like to leave the recording open to listeners’ thoughts.
Enjoy!
My son Ryden, at ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 (left to right)
