Category Archives: Recent Findings and Presentations

How the Read Lab is getting smarter in Portland this weekend…

We are at CDS! The Cognitive Development Society meeting is in Portland this year and while the rain falls outside it’s also drizzling new ideas here inside the conferences as well 🙂  We’ll update this post throughout the weekend, but for now we’ve heard some great talks from favorites in the field, Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Alison Gopnik on communicating developmental science to public audiences.

We’re getting ready for our own presentations tomorrow afternoon on  how book formats can help support children’s vocabulary learning. More pictures coming…

Do short breaks help loooong attention in kids?

Not everything we do around here is with preschoolers! The Whitfield Lab is currently looking for 8- to 10-year-olds for studies this fall  investigating how taking a short break in the middle of a computer lesson helps children to continue paying attention until the end of the task. What kind of break? How much could it help? Answers coming soon…

If you are interested in participating, contact us at childresearch@scu.edu  In the study, children will play some short memory games and a simple but challenging computer game over three-sessions – what they would often be doing at home anyway, but here we’ll turn it into science 🙂

Getting ready for a new school year!

While many of our students here at SCU haven’t returned to campus yet, the developmental labs are already hard at work making plans for fall research! We’re starting with some new outreach initiatives led by our new Research and Outreach Assistant, Maria Munoz Yepez (yay!). We’re currently working with partners at local preschools and elementary schools and San Jose public libraries to set up studies and get in touch with families interested in being a part of child development research. We are also looking for ideas for ways that we can give back to our parents and partners. If you’d like to get more involved in our research let us know! You can join our volunteer pool here: https://goo.gl/forms/nBdRIqNU0NnX8Rur2  or  if you are already in our volunteer pool but have some ideas for helping us stay better connected with you, you can  fill out a quick survey here: https://goo.gl/forms/Zoyha2uSKn9537iX2

Happy back-to-school!

End of year conference round-up!

Research students from all our labs have spent much of the Spring presenting new findings around the Bay Area. Highlights include Jessica’s presentation of some of the Read Lab’s new work on bilingual storybooks at SPARC (at San Jose State) and at the annual WPA (Western Psychological Association) meeting in Sacramento.

Jessica at WPA

Jaqueline presented her recent findings on how to support verb learning with storybooks at SPARC, and Berkeley’s California Cognitive Science conference, and at our own Sigma Xi conference at Santa Clara.

Megan and Jacqueline at Berkeley

And, Shreya presented some recent findings from the Bhagwat lab on bilingual children’s beliefs about where language comes from at both SPARC and the Berkeley Cognitive Science conference.

Angela and Shreya with Dr. Bhagwat at SPARC

Congratulations to all our senior researchers! We’re so proud.

It’s spring – time to play!

The Read Lab is celebrating the start of a new quarter with a newly published paper on the connection between language development and children’s verbal play abilities (see reference below). “Play ability?” you might ask. Can you measure children’s play? Well, Read Lab alumni, Sarah James and Andrew Weaver found a way, and they also found that the more clever (and silly) preschoolers got with their play, the stronger their verbal skills were – so maybe it’s not all just nonsense after all.

Andrew (and puppet) playing word games
Andrew (and puppet) playing word games

Another win for Dr. Seuss!

To read the full article:

Read, K., James, S. & Weaver A. (2017) Pie, Fry Why: Language play in children three to five years old. Journal of Early Childhood Research. Prepublished February 14, 2017. doi:10.1177/1476718X16664556

 

new storybook sharing survey for parents with children on the spectrum

The Read Lab’s team of students working on questions of how shared reading can specifically benefit children with ASD are looking to families to give them insight on shared reading in the home. They have finished developing a short survey for parents with children on the autism spectrum that can be found here:

shared reading survey

Please feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be interested in sharing their experiences reading with a child with autism (it only takes 20 minutes)!

Kids and Tech Conference

Members of the Read Lab just returned from this weekend’s Society for Research in Child Development’s special topic meeting on Technology and Media in Child Development at UC Irvine. We are full of new ideas and information about all the ways kids can (and can’t) use technologies to aid language learning!

Here we are with our lovely poster highlighting some of the newest findings in our study of how best to read e-books with young language learners on the autism spectrum:

Dr. Read and alumna, Erin Furay presenting our work on reading e-books with children on the autism spectrum.
Dr. Read and alumna, Erin Furay presenting our work on reading e-books with children on the autism spectrum.

 

back to school!

After a little summer break, the new SCU school year has begun, and the Read lab is excited to welcome some new research students!

Our lab meetings kicked off today, and new projects are already seeding. This year along with our continuing work on storybooks for dual language learners (new student captain: Jessica Jara), and our expanding work on e-books for children on the autism spectrum (new student captain: Marya Husary), we’re developing a new study on how children can learn new verbs from a rhyming treasure hunt story (captain: Jacqueline Quirk)! There will be more to come soon, but even now we can see that this year’s read lab ship is in good hands – aye, aye!

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Four of our seven new 2016/17 read lab members, from left to right: Marissa, Jacqueline, Megan and Marya. 

 

new story book study launched for dual-language learners

After many months preparing, the Read Lab has just launched the second half of our story book project for dual-language learners! Last year, with the imaginative, hard-working and phenomenal alumnae Bianca Zardetto and Anisha Agarwal, we finished a version of this study that looked at how beginner Spanish learners pick up new vocabulary differently from books written all in Spanish vs. code-switching books that just pepper in the Spanish words. We won’t give away the findings here just yet, but they were pretty remarkable 😉

Now we’re finally ready with four new books  to test beginner English learners in the same way. With our newest student researcher, Jessica Jara, doing both the outreach and reading, the study launched today at Hillview Library in San Jose.

In a few weeks we should have some findings that we can share, so stay tuned. And, in the meantime if you have or know a 2- to 5-year-old Spanish speaker who would like to hear a couple new animal stories, let us know!

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Anisha and Bianca reading at the 2015 Ed Fair