Last month students from the Read and Bhagwat labs presented three recent projects at the annual APS meeting in San Francisco. Here’s what we were chatting about:

Gilly Dosovitsky (’18)  presented recent findings from the Bhagwat lab that when children hear a story about learning a new language, it reduces the “essentialist” bias that some monolingual (but not bilingual) children have in thinking that the language they speak is just something they’re born with (like the color of their eyes) rather than something that comes from the world around them.

Paloma Contreras (’19), Maria Munoz Yepez (’19) and Raquel Hernandez (’18) presented brand new findings from the Read Lab’s local survey of 65 bilingual Spanish/English speaking families showing how diverse shared reading practices are within many different types of bilingual families, and interestingly how invested all parents are in nourishing both their young children’s languages in dual-language homes.

and,

Christina McCollum (’18) and Haley Green (’18) presented findings from their study in the Read Lab that shows reading stories with a 5-year-old can actually boost the positive mood of the reader (as well as the child) in a new take on the benefits of shared reading to all parties involved!

APS was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for all of our students! If you want to hear more about any of these projects as we spend the summer writing them up, let us know!