That’s the gist of a new study by Lizbeth Finestack and Marc Fey from the University of Kansas, published in the August ‘09 American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.  Their study compared 6-8 year olds assigned to either a deductive training group, or an inductive training group.  A computer program was used to teach a specific aspect of an invented alien language.   The deductive training group received explanations, i.e. a brief description of the target.  Both groups were made aware that the alien – “Tiki” – used many of the same words that we use, but this alien language also contained something different.  In this case that was different word endings for male and female verbs.  The kids in the deductive group were told that when it’s a boy you add -po to the end, and when it’s a girl you add -pa to the end.  The kids in the inductive group were just supposed to figure it out on their own, another way of saying they were required to use inductive reasoning.

Finestack and Fey’s results showed that significantly more kids in the deductive group acquired the target.   They concluded by asserting that generally, the most efficacious treatment may be one that combines natural language approaches with explanations.  For those with access, here’s the link.

Bilingual Babies and Executive Function – A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that early exposure to multiple languages increases abilities in executive function.  The researchers looked at infants in their home city of Trieste, an Italian city with a history of being at the crossroads of multiple cultures.  Babies from bilingual homes did better at tasks of executive function in the study – basically meaning that they demonstrated precocious abilities to switch attention compared to control babies.  You are more than welcome to go to this story from the Economist for more on the study.

Preschoolers Language Skills Partly Tied to Classmates’ Language Skills – A research team from Virginia and Ohio State longitudinally looked at over 1800 preschoolers to obtain their results, which are generally self explained from the headline.  The researchers mentioned the Matthew Effect in stating the importance of focusing on early childhood language skills.  They also described research demonstrating the correlation between receptive language and classroom attention (strong and very important).  A short synopsis of the study is here.  A more comprehensive report is here.

Richard Nisbett and Environmental IQ – Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist, has been getting good reviews for his book – Intelligence and How to Get it; Why Schools and Culture Count.  Nisbett counters hereditarian claims that roughly 75 to 80% of IQ is inherited with his own view that the number is probably less than 50%.  In addition to multiple other points, Nisbett points out the mistake often made in drawing erroneous conclusions from twin studies, such as those that find that the IQs of separated adopted twins correlate higher than twins living with biological parents.  We now better understand that the homes of adoptive parents themselves correlate extremely highly with rich, nurturing environments in which to raise children.  This book review from the NY Times, gives a real good feel for Nisbett’s book.

Scientific Consensus on How the Brain Processes Speech – Scientists may be reaching a consensus on how the brain processes speech.  Josef Rauschecker, from Georgetown University, claimed that his studies of primate and human brain imaging confirm his decade old theory that speech is processed roughly along pathways traveling from lower to higher functioning neural regions.  These pathways parallel similar visual pathways, but run from regions around the auditory cortex to regions in brain’s outer cortex.  This report from Science Daily, on Raushecker’s report in Nature Neuroscience, provides more info.

Not news or research, but here is an interesting recent Q and A in Newsweek on memory with a Harvard psychologist.

Now that I’m back, I’m planning on starting off with some brief bits concerning language and learning that I probably would have posted on over the past month or two, had I been here all along.

First this:  New findings from researchers at the University of Washington strengthen a suspected link between early childhood TV exposure and delayed language development.  The study looked at 329 children and found that an increase in TV time correlated negatively with both attempts to speak from the children, and words used by their caregivers.  This one has been reported in various places, such as USA Today, this link at LiveScience and in this link from ABC News.

Interestingly, a study published in the March issue of Pediatrics seemed to arrive at an opposite conclusion, while criticizing the widespread nature of the American Academy of Pediatric’s (AAP) often repeated recommendation that children should not watch any TV before age two.  Their conclusion was that duration of  TV watching has no cognitive effects on children under two.  This study, from researchers at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, surveyed 872 mothers on their childrens’ viewing habits.  After controlling for maternal age, income, education, language vocabulary scores, marital status, child’s age, gender, birth weight for gestational age, breastfeeding duration, race or ethnicity, primary language, and average sleeping duration, the researchers found no correlation (negative or positive) between TV watching and scores on tests of cognition and language.  More on this less reported study can be found here.

So, what to make of these seemingly contradictory studies?  Actually, both studies do add support to the advice many pediatricians have already been giving parents.  Because it may be unreasonable to expect that parents will completely turn off the TV for two years, the content and type of TV viewing is essential.  It may be more practical to advise parents to watch educational shows, and more importantly, watch these shows together, and talk about what it is that they are seeing.

Well, that post went longer than expected, so my brief accounts of other recent language and learning interest will have to come next.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have used direct recordings of neuronal activity in the human brain to demonstrate that specific neurons fire more frequently in response to unexpected rewards over unexpected losses.  No differences were observed in the study between expected rewards and losses.

In a report published in the journal Science, the researchers described how they used a computer based card game and micro-electrodes measuring neuronal impulses during deep brain stimulation surgery to confirm their hypothesis that lucky wins are remembered better than expected wins, or unexpected or expected losses.

So, our brains are primed to learn when surprised.  It seems like it should be common sense that variety and the unexpected should naturally engage the human mind, much more so than the expected and routine.  It’s interesting to see evidence of how this is ingrained in our brains.  Unfortunately, the rigid structure of the contemporary bureaucratic educational system, and the necessity of routine imposed by large classroom sizes naturally stifles the creativity necessary to take advantage of this study’s conclusion.  In our current system it is far too easy to impose learning rather than to entice learning. 

A nice, concise story can be found at PsychCentral at this link.  This University of Pennsylvania news release also has some good info.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have used studies of brain waves to show how the brain makes efficient use of tiny cues and context to rapidly anticipate and process language.  The studies have shown that different areas of the brain appear responsible for different aspects of comprehension.  As one example, a specific brain wave pattern called N400, located in the back of the head, has implicated that area in analyzing the meaning of sentences.  The N400 is a spike that occurs when a word is heard that is unexpected or out of context.  The remarkable aspect is the speed with which this spike occurs after the word – literally fractions of a second.  This, and other similar studies, have shown the amazing efficiency possessed by the human brain in using expectation and anticipation to assist in using language.  The study, published in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science, was led by Jos Van Berkum at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

The author’s research paper can be found here along with much detailed information.  A little more information can be found at this blog post.  My illustration derives from BrainWaves Educational Toys, which does have some cool toys.

After studying 88 children between the ages of 10 and 12, researchers at England’s Coventry University concluded that contrary to public perception, increased texting correlates to increased reading scores.  The study was published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, and supports similar results of other studies such as from the University of Toronto.

The study’s relevance to the larger notion of language and learning is this:  no matter the form, meaningful exposure to language assists language learning.  According to Dr. Beverley Plester, the study’s lead author, “The more exposure you have to the written word the more literate you become and we tend to get better at things we do for fun.”  The BBC story link is here.

According to a study published in the February 13th issue of Science Magazine, researchers found that the babies of parents with higher education levels and income had both higher use of gesture and higher vocabulary.  While its not clear if the chicken or egg comes first in this case, the established link between these three things (socioeconomic status, vocabulary, gesture use) is an important step toward future research.  The story, linked here from US News and World Reports suggests that the next step may be trying to determine if increasing gestures in babies may lead to later vocabulary growth.  One element that may also contribute to this link is motivation – a child who is more motivated to communicate in general may be likely to use whatever means necessary, whether gesture or language.  Gesture is also often an important foundation for oral language, as children not motivated to speak frequently need the motivation to communicate that pointing and other gestures can provide.

Study shows link between body language and socioeconomic status (SES). – Researchers at UC-Berkeley used videotaped sessions of various people in one-on-one interviews to confirm their hypothesis that people use nonverbal cues to communicate their SES.  These behaviors included disengagment behaviors, such as doodling and fidgeting, and engagment behaviors, such as eye contact, head nodding, and laughing.  Their results showed that individuals from higher SES groups displayed more disengagment behaviors, and that observers were able to identify the SES of study participants after looking at 60 second clips of their interviews.  The researchers surmised that wealthy folks depend on others less, something which is reflected in their nonverbal communication. 

Here’s the journal reference:  Kraus et al. Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A Thin-Slicing Approach. Psychological Science, 2009; 20 (1): 99 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02251.x   The Science Daily report is here.  A PsychCentral commentary is here.

I like learning new things that may have future relevance.  That’s why this story from Science Daily especially appealed to me.  It taught me about the Baldwin Effect, an effect relevant enough to have over 9 million Google search results, and a Wikipedia entry, yet something I’d never heard of.  Essentially, the Baldwin Effect can be a sort of an evolutionary short cut from learning to instinct.  Animals that have a predisposition to learning anything (like language) that enhances its survivability can turn that anything into an instinct under lengthy continuous circumstances.  The study authors conclude that a “universal grammar” must have arisen by societal impetus that predates the relatively recent divergence of language over the last 100,000 years.

I personally believe the univeral grammar is an invention that describes a phenomenon that occurs because of universal human needs.  Because (nearly) all humans need to describe things that have happened, we get past tense, for instance.  There are guys and gals in all human cultures, and they all possess things, so we get possessive pronouns.  What linguistic construct exists that has been used as support for universal grammar, and is useful to one group of humans, but not another?  Let me know if you come up with one.

According to a study published in the December 2008 Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, children in second grade with language impairments have a pronounced delay in word recognition and reading comprehension that remains delayed through tenth grade.  This delay, however, only widens slightly for reading comprehension, and does not widen at all for word recognition.

The study, by Hugh Catts, Mindy Sittner Bridges, Todd Little, and J. Bruce Tomblin, compared the development of over 600 kids with language impairment and normal language over a nine grade span.  The authors stressed that while the delays did not worsen or worsen much over this time, they did not get smaller either.  This lends strength to the assumption that early language impairment is an excellent indicater of later reading disability.

Implications?  More screening early on, and also more in-depth screening.  In addition to looking at phonological awareness and letter knowledge, early screening would be most effective if it also looked at vocabulary, grammar, and narration abilities.