Hi friends, research collaborators and families. It may come as no surprise that we haven’t had an opportunity in the last couple of months to update our blog with the tidal wave of changes that we’re all experiencing right now. But, we want you to know that we are still here, and we are working (a little slower than usual) behind the scenes to find new ways to share the work that we finished earlier this Spring, and to reimagine the studies we were starting and planning in new formats. Hopefully, our labs will be able to share with you very soon some creative online adaptations of our shared reading, language play, and social cognition studies that will allow for wider and more accessible participation.
It’s been a busy year of growth and development in 2019… not just for the kiddos that we’re studying but for the Read Lab too 🙂 Here are some highlights:
at the Cognitive Development Society meeting in Louisville, KY
In 2019 seven fabulous student researchers graduated (#scuproud) and eight new researchers have joined our team. The students in the Read Lab power all of our work and are the friendly faces that the kids interact with, the creative juice behind our kid-friendly stories and games, and the dedicated assistants who code, transcribe, edit and read.. read.. read.. the background literature every week. Our team is our research family and in 2019 it was a big family indeed!
In 2019 we shared our hottest findings and works in progress at three international conferences – the Jean Piaget Society meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Child Language Forum in Sheffield, England and most recently the Cognitive Development Society meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. These meetings help connect the work we do here at Santa Clara with other labs and researchers far and wide, keep us up to speed on what other researchers are up to in the world of early language learning, and give us a chance to gather great ideas and feedback on the best new ways to ask and answer questions about what and how to enrich the language development of the kids we work with!
In 2019 our newest favorite paper on how dramatic pausing in read alouds helps children pick up new vocabulary from storybooks came out in the peer reviewed journal First Language (check it out here!) and we’re super proudof it.
In 2019 with the support our local family volunteers and partner preschools we wrapped up four different studies with the participation of over 150 children and their caregivers! Stay tuned in 2020 as we analyze all this data and can share more findings about how children can (or sometimes can’t) use rhyme to help them learn, the types of bilingual storybooks that can help children grow their second language vocabularies, and what children learn from hearing their own names in books about sharing – hint: it may not be how to be better at sharing 🙂
And, finally, in 2019 we started planning three new (funny, bilingual, science-y) projects that you’ll be hearing much more about in 2020!
lab lunch in the sun with the whole research family
And, now a holiday break before the next year of reading, adventure, and language learning kicks off…
It’s summertime in the Read Lab, which means strolls around the quiet campus and lots of project planning for the coming fall. While we gather ideas, we have a few questions for parents (and kiddos) to help us get a sense of what our young storybook listeners are noticing and commenting on when they share a book with a grown-up. If you have a child in your family (aged 2- to 6) who you like to curl up and read with, and you’ve got 10 minutes to spare we’d love to hear from you. You can take our quick online survey here:
This Spring a new paper is out in the journal First Languagefrom the Read Lab (full version) on the surprising benefits of taking a …. pause before introducing a new word when reading aloud with a preschooler. It turns out that in structured texts (like our little rhyming stories) pausing just enough to give a child two or three seconds to think about what word might be coming next creates enough of an attentional orienting effect to help make that word extra memorable once you read it, and even at the end of the story. The fun part is that kids don’t even have to guess the word correctly to receive the memory boost, the pause just gives them a chance to interact a little bit more with the language that they are hearing. And, as we know from so much of the language learning work we do.. the more kids actively interact instead of just passively listening, the more they learn!
Stay tuned for pictures from the Jean Piaget Society meeting (Portland) and the Child Language Forum (Sheffield) where Dr. Read will be presenting these findings!
With the new year upon us, the Read Lab is exploring a new question about the benefits of shared reading. In a study lead by Honors Student and Research Assistant extraordinaire, Ellen Kruse, we are looking at whether 4- and 5-year-olds really pick up on the “lessons” that some children’s books are meant to impart.
Lessons can be complicated (e.g., what’s going on in The Giving Tree??) but also simple (e.g., “sharing is good”), and there may be some aspects of the books themselves that make the lessons easier or harder for children to relate to (e.g., how much is the main character really like me?). So Ellen is tackling this with a new storybook study in our lab, and if you have a 4-year-old who likes to hear new stories and who might want to tell us what they think of ours, let us know and we’ll be happy to shareour study with you!
Hear Dr. Read’s (one minute!) podcast from last week on WAMC’s “The Academic Minute” and find out what we’re learning about the utility of rhyme and strategic pauses for helping highlight new words in storybook reading!
The Read Lab is wrapping up our 2-year study of which types of bilingual books best help Spanish and English learning children of different ages and stages grow their vocabularies. If you live close to Santa Clara and you’ve got a 3- to 5-year-old at home who like learning Spanish and English words, let us know! (email: childresearch@scu.edu)Â We’re giving bilingual books away to our volunteers, but only for one more month!
We’ll be spending the winter analyzing all the data that our junior scientists have been helping us with on this project.. so stay tuned this Spring for a summary of our findings, and in the meantime.. tell us what your favorite bilingual book is!
We just got back from the biennial International Mind Brain and Education Society conference in Los Angeles and wanted to follow up with some of our key take-aways.
This conference (and society) is an exceptional place for people interested in the intersection between neuroscience and education at all levels, there were presentations by school administers alongside some of the top neuroscientists and geneticists in the country. And, connections were being made all over the place between the lab and the classroom. We’ll be going back in two years!
The research presented by Ellen Bialystok (and many colleagues) on the benefits across the lifespan of bilingualism were jaw-dropping, and super inspiring to our lab who are still hard at work collecting data from local families on the kinds of storybooks that best support dual-language learning.
Along those lines, IMBES was a great venue for getting feedback on some of our initial conclusions and future questions about dual-language s(which we’ll be posting about soon)hared reading…
Thanks to so many thoughtful listeners at Paloma’s presentation!
There were so many other presentations that had us scribbling down references, and notes and questions and ideas that we can’t list them all here. (Yet)
What has the Read Lab been up to this summer, you ask?
So. Much. Fun. Research.
I spy a sloth hanging out in Amsterdam
Summer kicked of in Amsterdam, where Dr. Read presented a talk to developmental psychology colleagues at the annual Jean Piaget Society meeting. The talk was on the importance of thinking carefully about the types of books we choose helping young dual-language learners build vocabulary (more to come in our next post on this!), and was a great way to connect with some like-minded researchers from across Europe who think about bilingualism and early child development as much as we do!
Ellen thinking about all her favorite children’s books.
But, Dr. Read hasn’t been the only one out and about this summer – while our research and outreach assistant, Maria Munoz-Yepez has spent the summer in Ecuador (check out the blog she’s keeping about her travels), we have had a new student outreach assistant, Ellen, taking over the reigns, and you might have seen her out and about at The Children’s Discovery Museum, at local San Jose Public Libraries, at Hicklebees… she’s been hitting the pavement at all our favorite places to tell families about the work we do, and helping them get involved in language learning with us!
And, lastly we’ve also had a team of new research students this summer through a special grant for summer undergraduate research (SUPRE) from the American Psychological Association. These SUPRE students – Prynce, Jade, Hector and Leya – are SUPER (haha, couldn’t resist),
The SUPRE students go into the field at the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose
and they’ve been working full time this summer integrating their training in neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and cultural psychology with our work in child development. They’re learning the ins and outs of study design, eye-tracking, data analysis… and, of course, how to read a good storybook aloud!
Prynce giving a SUPER reading of The Hungry Thing to an attentive audience at Kids on Campus
We’re looking forward to another month of this here in the lab, and will report on some of our accomplishments and findings soon. As my PhD advisor used to always say.. “Have a productive vacation!” (Just kidding, we’re taking days off to relax as well).
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)Â and Raquel Hernandez (’18)Â 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.
Raquel, Paloma & Maria presenting “It’s not Just Esto o Aquello”
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!
Christy and Haley presenting “I Feel Less Blue When I Read with You”
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!
Hear Dr. Read’s (one minute!) 
The Read Lab is wrapping up our 2-year study of which types of bilingual books best help Spanish and English learning children of different ages and stages grow their vocabularies. If you live close to Santa Clara and you’ve got a 3- to 5-year-old at home who like learning Spanish and English words, let us know! (email: 
