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…
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
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.
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
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
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:
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)!
The Read lab’s newest storybook study on verb learning is launching tomorrow. Captained by Jaqueline Quirke (arrrr!!), we are taking 2- to 5-year-olds on a treasure hunt to find out if they can learn some challenging action words from our story. Stay aboard to help us find the treasure!
Our story’s hero, Kara, taking a close look at the treasure map!
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.
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!
Four of our seven new 2016/17 read lab members, from left to right: Marissa, Jacqueline, Megan and Marya.Â
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!
Two student researchers from the Read Lab and recent graduates (congrats!!), Tess Miller and Erin Furay have just been accepted to present their initial findings from our study of e-book reading with young children on the autism spectrum at the nationally recognized Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) 2016 Special Topics Meeting on Technology and Media in Children’s Development in October (whew, that’s a mouthful). This comes after a busy spring quarter in which Tess, Erin and their co-investigator, graduate student in the SCU school of Education, Katie Ciffone, also presented the work at San Jose State’s 2016 Spartan Psychological Association Research Conference (SPARC), at the annual conference of the Western Psychological Association (WPA), and at Santa Clara’s own First Annual Compassion in Action for Children Research Conference. They have spent the last two months gathering so much great feedback from other researchers, therapists and parents on this inspiring work.
The team recently wrapped up the first version of the study, which looks at the differences between how children with autism respond to and remember specially designed stories read to them on e-books either with or without the scaffolding of a therapist. With the amazing volunteer help of 10 local families with children on the spectrum, this one-of-a-kind study has already given us some promising insights into the role that both the therapist and an e-reader can play in helping children learn from stories.
We are so proud of this work and how it highlights the abilities of even very young children on the spectrum working against big challenges in their language development. We are also super proud of Tess, Erin and Katie for all the months of hard work and love they have poured (and are still pouring) into this project.
Tess, Erin and Katie presenting at WPA
And now… while preparing for the SRCD conference, we are also busy expanding our repertoire of books and planning a follow up study for the fall.  Book topic suggestions, ideas and questions welcome! Stay tuned…
