celebrating 10!

Read Lab, Recent Findings and Presentations

This month, the Read Lab is celebrating (virtually) the publication of our 10th peer-reviewed research study. All the research we do in the lab is focused on preschoolers and how they play and learn language skills from playful everyday experiences like shared reading.

We’re so proud that this work is out there in the big wide world for developmental scientists and parents and teachers (and people who are all three!) to learn from. Here’s our list, and here’s to another ten great projects in the future!

The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading (2014) by Kirsten Read, Megan Macauley & Erin Furay

Clues cue the smooze: rhyme, pausing, and prediction help children learn new words from storybooks (2014) by Kirsten Read

The third voice: Do enhanced e-books enhance the benefits of shared story reading with preschoolers? (2016) by Kathleen Ciffone, Andrew Weaver & Kirsten Read

Pie, fry, why: Language play in 3-to 5-year-old children (2017) by Kirsten Read, Sarah James & Andrew Weaver

The cat has a…: Children’s use of rhyme to guide sentence completion (2018) by Kirsten Read and Madeline Regan

Rhyme and word placement in storybooks support high-level verb mapping in 3-to 5-year-olds (2018) by Kirsten Read & Jacqueline Quirke

Using strategic pauses during shared reading with preschoolers: Time for prediction is better than time for reflection when learning new words (2019) by Kirsten Read, Erin Furay & Dana Zylstra

E-books for children with autism: Best read alone or with a therapist? (2020) by Erin Soares, Therese Miller, Kathleen Ciffone & Kirsten Read

Can reading personalized storybooks to children increase their prosocial behavior? (2020) by Ellen Kruse, Isabelle Faller & Kirsten Read

¿Read conmigo?: The effect of code-switching storybooks on dual-language learners’ retention of new vocabulary (2020) by Kirsten Read, Paloma Contreras, Bianca Rodriguez & Jessica Jara

… we’re adapting

Bhagwat Lab, Current and Ongoing Studies, Getting Involved, Read Lab

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.

Stay tuned!

year in review…

Current and Ongoing Studies, Read Lab, Recent Findings and Presentations

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 proud of 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…

tell us what your child thinks of the stories you read…

Current and Ongoing Studies, Getting Involved, Read Lab

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:

Shared Reading Survey for Parents

And, happy summer!

pausing for effect… and learning

Read Lab, Recent Findings and Presentations

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!

BookWeek100 and our mini-marathon story time!

Uncategorized

In all of our research with young children, we reveal over and over again the importance of positive interaction and sharing stories with young children. Our labs, and our student readers, in particular, were so excited last week to share in this with some of our most favorite community friends, partners and volunteers. Hosting the mini-marathon story time was a way for us to to just connect and share back what we are learning about everyday – that words and ideas and books help us all grow! Special thanks go out to Every Child a Reader, the sponsor organization, to our own SCU Library for helping us host, and for all the wide-eyed and well-behaved attendees that made sharing stories so fun. Let’s do it again next year!

pro-social? what can kids really learn from stories?

Current and Ongoing Studies, Getting Involved, Read Lab

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 share our study with you!

last chance…

Current and Ongoing Studies, Getting Involved, Read Lab

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) 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!