What We Learned from Research in 2024
2024 was another great year filled with fascinating research.
Over the course of this year, I’ve written a few posts about some of it:
- How to Externalize Internal Language
- Research Highlight 3: The Reading Profiles of English Learners
- Research Highlight 4: Structuring Classroom Learning for Student Success and Agency
- A speculative series (7 posts so far) on AI, LLMs, and Language!
- Research Highlight 5: Learning In a New Language Takes Effort
Last year, I began a tradition that seems worth maintaining: reviewing all the sundry research that has come across my radar over the course of 2024.
The method I used to create this wrap-up was to go back through my X/Twitter and Bluesky timelines starting in January, and pull all research related tweets into a doc. I then began sorting those by theme and ended up with several high-level buckets, with further sub-themes within and across those buckets.
The rough big ticket items I ended up with were:
- The Science of Reading and Writing
- Content Knowledge as an Anchor to Literacy
- Studies on Language Development
- Immigration, Multilinguals, and Multilingualism
- Rhythm, Attention, and Memory
- School, Social-Emotional, and Contextual Effects
The Science of Reading and Writing
There were some insightful, confirming, and surprising studies adding to the body of what we know about reading and writing development.
Dyslexia
There was a focus on revisiting the definition of dyslexia and considerations for both streamlining and expanding it.
“Given the potential for the definition of dyslexia to be conflated with an eligibility category, along with other considerations, another significant theme emerged: the need to streamline the definition for more effective identification and intervention.” Annals of Dyslexia, Odegard et al.
“A new definition of dyslexia...needs to transcend both past unitary characterizations and past assumptions based largely on the English orthography” Annals of Dyslexia, Wolf et al.
Speaking of moving past assumptions solely based on the English orthography, another study in this issue focused on how dyslexia manifested similarly and differently in children in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei.
The study indicates that while some core deficits like phonological processing are present across all locations, the manifestation of dyslexia varied due to differences in script complexity, language, and teaching methods.
“Among the most interesting findings in the present study is that, compared to word reading, our task of character reading (fluency) was better able to distinguish children with or with-out dyslexia in Hong Kong and Taipei. This may be because characters are more difficult to recognize when presented alone than in multiple-character words.” Annals of Dyslexia, Jue Pan, et al.
Want to improve phonemic awareness in pre-readers at risk for dyslexia? Have them play Space Invaders Extreme 2!
“More than 80% of the at-risk pre-readers in the AVG [Action Video Game] group showed an improvement in phonemic awareness that was above the mean gain observed in the combined control groups, indicating the treatment's high efficacy.” Science of Learning
What the heck is going on here? The researchers hypothesize that action video games, which can be fast-paced and unpredictable, can support more efficient integration of sensory input, which may be less efficient or slower in children at risk for dyslexia.
Phonological and Morphological Awareness
When it comes to polysyllabic word reading (words like “dinosaur” or “construction”), this study found that kids in grade 3-5 who already knew a word were more likely to read it correctly. While this study doesn’t provide implications for students learning English, clearly ensuring that they can connect the meaning of words to the forms of words is important – more on this below in the section on multilingual learners. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
And indeed, knowing more about the forms of words – and not only their sounds – “is an important longitudinal predictor of spelling development.” Journal of Research in Reading
When learning new words, the distinctiveness of those words helps them to be remembered.
- “Results showed that those words which exhibited distinctive characteristics – whether due to clear speech style, low frequency, or low density – were remembered better. The finding supports the Distinctiveness Hypothesis, suggesting that our capacity for remembering words relies on their distinctiveness, rather than on our capacity for recognizing them in real time.” Psychology of Language
And let’s not forget the importance of morphological awareness!
- “we have found that preschool morphological awareness, assessed prior to any formal literacy instruction, is a unique predictor of later reading comprehension but not of word reading skills.” Scientific Studies of Reading
While there are large differences within and between studies, morphology instruction appears to be effective for improving reading and spelling outcomes, and spelling effects can transfer to untrained words. Educational Psychology Review
Morphological systems are dynamic – balancing regularity and irregularity of forms.
- ”...a balance between regular structures and exceptional forms not only facilitates generalization but may also be essential for efficient linguistic performance and adaptation.” Cognitive Linguistics
Orthographic Processing
As we read, our eyes fixate briefly on the words in print. But we are not simply fixating on the center of words – we are also using what we know of the statistical structure of language to target the position in a word that minimizes uncertainty and maximizes our reading efficiency.
- “we provide causal evidence that the way in which a language distributes information affects how readers land on words.” Journal of Memory and Language
The presence of nearby words can interfere with the brain's ability to process a fixated word, suggesting that skilled reading involves a constant balancing act.
- “We conclude that skilled reading involves a constant complex interplay between the drive toward efficiency, which requires a broad attentional field, and the need to shield processing from interference, which limits attentional breadth.” PsyArXiv Preprints
Beyond Word Reading
After all, acquiring reading fluency is not only about recognizing words in isolation but also about efficiently processing them in sequence.
- “These findings suggest that, beyond individual word recognition, reading fluency development also requires efficient processing of multiple items presented in serial format (termed ‘cascaded processing’).” Scientific Studies of Reading
Language regions in the left hemisphere light up when reading uncommon sentences, while straightforward sentences elicit little response.
- ”...the sentences that elicit the highest brain response have a weird grammatical thing and/or a weird meaning.” MIT News
When it comes to reading fluency, however, we need to be cautious in interpreting oral reading fluency rates as it relates to reading comprehension. ORF measures are widely used as a proxy for reading comprehension.
- “The results of this study suggest that outcomes from oral reading fluency assessments that focus on rate and accuracy may not be valid indicators of reading comprehension when passages include complex, academic language.”
Why might this be? Many widely used tests of reading fluency may use simplified texts, which most students can comprehend more easily, thus inflating the correlation between fluency and comprehension. Journal of School Psychology
Gaining fluency in writing also leads to higher quality writing.
- “Results showed that children who had higher writing fluency...had higher quality writing, and this was explained directly by transcription skills and indirectly by executive functions such as working memory.” Journal of Educational Psychology
Improving Reading and Writing
There is a lot of improvement still needed in classroom instruction for reading comprehension, as this follow-up from a 50 year old observation study found. While research-based practices have increased, teachers continue to spend time mainly engaging in IRE styles of discourse (initiation-response-evaluation) rather than engaging students in extensive discussion of text or teaching practices and knowledge that more deeply support reading comprehension.
- “based on the findings from the observation studies reviewed, we have considerable opportunity in classroom instruction to enact the research-based practices for teaching reading comprehension that have been identified through research so far.” Scientific Studies of Reading
While we know that kindergarten reading intervention can be critical for students at risk, providing the right level of fidelity and dosage requires supporting teachers with implementation.
- “The results suggest teachers may need more systems-level support to ensure the intensity of instruction required to improve the early reading skills of students at risk for reading difficulties.” The Elementary School Journal
To further the point that teachers need systems-level support: aligning Tier 2 interventions with Tier 1 instruction leads to improved content knowledge, vocabulary, and content reading comprehension for kids who need it the most in fourth grade.
- “Findings from the present study suggest that aligned instruction may be especially beneficial for students with inattention” Journal of School Psychology
In a new report, “The Opportunity Makers,” TNTP similarly stressed the importance of instructional coherence and consistency in schools that were making a difference in students’ learning outcomes.
- “Research shows that instructional coherence in a school helps students learn, while incoherence creates confusion and saps students’ confidence. According to Newmann et al. (2001), “Students are more likely to engage in the difficult work of learning when experiences within classes, among classes, and over time are connected to one another. When faced with incoherent activities, students are more likely to feel that they are targets of apparently random events and that they have less knowledge of what should be done to succeed.” TNTP
One thing is for sure: simply adding more independent reading time to a school schedule is no guarantee of improved reading comprehension.
- “Our results from 14 primary studies comprising 5,522 participants in the treatment group and 4,966 in the control group alluded to no meaningful beneficial effects of independent reading on reading outcomes.” Reading & Writing Quarterly
Integrating reading with explicit writing instruction “can improve primary grade students’ writing, discourse knowledge, planning, oral language, and spelling skills.” Scientific Studies of Reading
Writing is a technology that has further differentiated humans from other animals.
- “writing enabled humans to think more abstractly and logically by increasing information capacity.” Nature Reviews Psychology
Writing by hand is critical to not only developing literacy – but for adults for deeper thinking and learning.
- “These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on.” NPR
Screen Time and Literacy
Most screen time can be detrimental to language and reading development, and to deeper comprehension of what we read. And yet digital technology is increasingly ubiquitous in classrooms and in our lives.
“Our results demonstrate a positive association between shared reading and vocabulary in both age groups, and a negative association between screen time and vocabulary in 24-month-olds.” Journal of Child Language
“Television seems to be the medium most detrimental to children’s skills, as it is used in a passive manner and is often characterised by language and content that do not suit the child’s processing mode.” Brain Sciences
“For every extra minute of screen time, the three-year-olds in the study were hearing seven fewer words, speaking five fewer words themselves and engaging in one less conversation.” JAMA Pediatrics
“The results of the two meta-analyses in the present study yield a clear picture of screen inferiority, with lower reading comprehension outcomes for digital texts compared to printed texts, which corroborates and extends previous research.” Educational Research Review
All of that said, there is evidence that enhancing the interactivity of a PBS KIDS science show with conversational agents enhances their science learning. Journal of Educational Psychology
Content Knowledge as an Anchor to Literacy
Speaking of reading comprehension and science, ever since E.D. Hirsch, Jr. first proposed the concept of “core knowledge,” there has been increasing research demonstrating the importance of content knowledge to reading comprehension and literacy development – and vice versa.
Background Knowledge, Reading Comprehension, and the Novice-Expert Continuum
Hugh Catts and Alan Kamhi wrote a great piece on the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension, stressing the understanding of reading comprehension as a constellation of skills rather than a singular component.
- “reading comprehension is one of the most complex activities that we engage in on a regular basis, and our ability to do so is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills. These include relevant background knowledge and reasoning abilities. Also, like listening comprehension, it is dependent on well-developed language abilities, including not only vocabulary knowledge but also an understanding of grammar and text-level structures (e.g., pronoun referencing and story structure). In addition, it is influenced by the nature of the text being read (e.g., its topic, complexity, and cohesion) and the purpose of reading (e.g., to study for a test or evaluate an opinion piece). Finally, it is acquired not in a few short years, but over one’s lifetime. For these reasons, comprehension needs to be differentiated from skill-based components of reading and treated as the complex behavior it is.” American Educator
As with reading, it’s important for writers to remember the novice vs. expert continuum, especially in terms of their audience. This study found that journalists write mostly at the level that makes most sense to them – but their readers would far prefer reading texts that were simpler.
- “those who write the news read it differently from those who merely consume it. As observed in many other areas, expertise may undermine effective perspective-taking” Science Advances
After all, expertise and experience is a precondition for flow, as brain scans of Philly jazz musicians reveals. The Conversation
Building Interdisciplinary Knowledge
Disciplinary read-alouds can build interdisciplinary student knowledge and reading comprehension through the use of “structured supplements” that promotes transfer and connections between schema and vocabulary. In this study, students connected social studies and science content and texts.
“The mediation results suggest that teacher language scaffolds can function as temporary dialogic supports that go above and beyond the intervention script and support students’ reading comprehension.”
“In essence, treatment group teachers provided more opportunities for students both to hear and use academic vocabulary by engaging in discussions to make connections between known and new topics.” Scientific Studies of Reading
“This experimental study illustrates how sustaining and spiraling science schemas (background knowledge) and vocabulary from Grades 1 to 3 can improve students’ ability to comprehend passages in science, English language arts, and mathematics. Furthermore, findings suggest that systematically building background and vocabulary knowledge can sustain positive gains in elementary-grade students’ reading comprehension ability through the end of Grade 4, 14 months after the conclusion of the intervention activities.” Developmental Psychology; also see Neena Saha’s great Reading Research Recap on this study
Boosting knowledge of science vocabulary improves science knowledge.
- “Greater science vocabulary knowledge was associated with higher science test scores for children with language/literacy disorders (LLDs) and typical language development (TD). These findings indicate that increasing science vocabulary knowledge may improve science achievement outcomes for students with LLDs or TD.” ASHA Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools
Another study demonstrated that a classroom-based content literacy intervention significantly improved argumentative writing skills for both English learners (ELs) and their English-proficient (EP) peers in grades 1 and 2. The intervention consisted of thematic units in social studies and science designed to build students’ content and vocabulary knowledge through informational texts and concept mapping and to transfer their schema to argumentative writing and research collaboration. Journal of Educational Psychology
If we want more literacy instruction integrated into secondary content area classrooms, then we had better consider “ease of use” for teachers to incorporate those practices successfully. Reading Psychology
Math, Language, and Literacy
Content knowledge and literacy and language development aren’t only about social studies and science, by the way. Math and reading fluency are connected!
- “variations in reading fluency predict variations in arithmetic fluency in Grades 1 to 3. Meanwhile, variations in arithmetic fluency predict variations in reading fluency in Grades 1 to 2.” PsyArXiv Preprints
In fact, language is fundamental to math.
- “We must be handed the cognitive tools of numbers before we can consistently and easily recognize higher quantities.” The Conversation
An analysis of 1,657 4th/5th grade lessons in 317 classrooms in 4 districts finds “students’ exposure to mathematical language varies substantially across lessons” and students make more progress in classrooms where teachers use more mathematical language. EdWorkingPapers
Furthermore, “Students learn more math skills when their teacher devotes more class time to individual practice and assessment. In contrast, students learn more language skills when their teacher devotes more class time to discussion and work in groups of students” Harvard GSE Ed Magazine
When it comes to supporting students at various levels of proficiency in the language of instruction (in this study’s case, German), language supports should be provided only to those at lower levels of proficiency.
- “”The findings indicate that the principle of 'more is better' does not always apply to additional language support, and that identical learning materials may not be suitable for all students.” Educational Studies in Mathematics
Another study highlighted the interconnected nature of reading and content knowledge, showing that early reading skills boost initial growth in science and math. Furthermore, as children progress through elementary school, the mutually reinforcing relationship between reading proficiency and knowledge in science and math becomes increasingly strong, with each skill continually enhancing the other.
- ”Notably, multilingual students instructed in their native languages demonstrate more robust connections between early domain knowledge and subsequent reading proficiency. These findings emphasize the benefits of native-language instruction for fostering reading and domain knowledge, providing educators with clear evidence of the importance of incorporating native-language support in early education.” Developmental Psychology
Studies on Language Development
We’ll dig far deeper into multilingualism and its relation to overall language and literacy development in our next section. Before we do, however, let’s look at some of the studies related to language development at large.
The Foundations of Language and Literacy
The acoustic environment that one is born into is important for all species.
“exposure of birds that are in the egg to moderate levels of noise can lead to developmental problems, amounting to increased mortality and reduced life-time reproductive success. Such noisy conditions at the beginning of acoustic life may affect behavioral and cognitive development in many more species.” Science
A reminder that we’ve explored the impact of acoustics previously inThe Influence of Acoustics on Learning.
Animals may lack language (and other human-distinctive behavioural traits) because they perform badly at remembering sequences of stimuli.
- “..the presumed absence of evolutionary continuity between animal communicative systems and human language aligns well with the view that language structure is culturally emergent rather than inborn.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences
For humans, “Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages.”
- Did you know that “”newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue”? Aeon
Not only that, but how the brains of newborns respond to speech is predictive of their later literacy development.
- “Stronger neural responses measured in the brain in infancy to changes in speech sounds were associated with better pre-reading skills, such as rapid naming.” University of Helsinki News
Furthermore, the connectivity of the infant brain–specifically in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) strongly predicts future reading abilities. The strength of these early neural connections in infancy forecasts phonological skills at kindergarten, which in turn mediate the relationship between the infant brain's organization and school-age reading proficiency.
- “Overall, our findings illuminate the neurobiological mechanisms by which infant language capacities could scaffold long-term reading acquisition.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Sensitivity to the sounds of speech is not only important in infants. For adults, too, “”individual differences in sensitivity to phonetic categories mediates speech perception in challenging listening situations.”
The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America
The Patterns of Language
People learn patterns better when they are simple and consistent. This includes languages, but also visual, auditory, and even tactile information. This shapes not only how we learn languages but also how languages evolve over time.
- “the patterns that are more easily learned are precisely the ones that are found most frequently across languages.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Our brains are more aligned with AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) than we may think.
Even without training, a simple computer model can process language much like the human brain does, if it's built with certain key features like how it breaks down words and uses context. arXiv Preprints
“The better a model was at predicting the next word it would hear, the more likely it was to align with brain data.” PNAS
A reminder that I did a deep dive series on AI, LLMs, and Language.
This paper shows our brains can effortlessly detect patterns at both fast and slow timescales (prioritizing quick changes). Remarkably, this dual-level learning process can be modeled by simple neural networks, suggesting a unified mechanism for processing complex temporal information. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The sounds and rhythm of language, also known as prosody, were found to play a role in how we process syntax.
- “Our findings indicate that the neural representation of syntactic phrase boundaries is enhanced when they are aligned with strong prosodic boundaries, suggesting that prosodic cues scaffold the brain’s ability to process syntactic information.” Communications Biology
And the brain processes phonemes in parallel, meaning multiple sounds can be processed simultaneously without interference. What’s also crazy is that our brains actually retain a speech sound briefly as other sounds are coming in, so there is elapsed processing time. Also fascinatingly, the first phoneme of a word appears to be processed differently from subsequent phonemes. The neural representation of the first phoneme can be decoded earlier, and its information is maintained for a longer duration.
- Learned about this one from Stephen Wilson’s The Language Neuroscience podcast interview with Laura Gwilliams about her 2022 paper in Nature Communications.
The Role of Linguistic Input
You’ve no doubt heard of the infamous “30 million word gap.” Yet one of the key themes of more recent research – including this year’s – is that the quality of input that children receive is far more important than quantity alone.
A study introduced a novel term—“burstiness”—to describe irregular, “spiky” bursts of speech which were found to be more beneficial for vocabulary growth than a consistent stream of language. The researchers used child-centered audio recorders to track the language environments of 292 children aged 2-7 years, over 555 days.
- ““children who heard spiky, more intense bouts of input had larger vocabularies. . . Input bursts provide rich opportunities for children to learn, while ebbs give children the opportunity to consolidate the new referent information and entrench representations to facilitate later retrieval.” Developmental Science
“Together these findings highlight the fact that quality of input per se matters more than child age, grade, or language of instruction.” Psychological Bulletin
Gestures
Linguistic input is not merely confined to speech. When referents are not physically present, caregivers use multimodal cues, particularly iconic cues. Iconic cues are communicative forms, such as words, signs, or gestures, that have a resemblance to the sensory-motor or conceptual properties of their referents.
- “the affordances of multimodal, iconic cues that caregivers use in interactions can allow children to draw on prior knowledge gained through general cognitive and motor development to scaffold their vocabulary learning.” Child Development
In fact, gestures provide a critically important source of input.
“our minds can change when we see others gesture and when we ourselves gesture. However, when pitted against each other, doing our own gesture is a more powerful learning tool than seeing someone else's gesture, at least when young children learn about mental rotation.”
“adding gesture to a lesson can boost performance in children from less advantaged homes so that it is equal to performance in children from advantaged homes.” Topics in Cognitive Science
Speaking of gestures – the stereotype that Italians gesture more effusively than others certainly bears out when you compare them to Swedes (my heritage).
- “The results show that (1) Italians overall do gesture more than Swedes; (2) Italians produce more pragmatic gestures than Swedes who produce more referential gestures; (3) both groups show sensitivity to narrative level: referential gestures mainly occur with narrative clauses, and pragmatic gestures with meta- and paranarrative clauses.” Frontiers in Communication
Shared Reading
Of course, we also know that one of the richest sources of linguistic input, especially early in life, is via shared reading.
- “Our current analysis suggests that shared reading (or a more broadly assessed home literacy environment that includes shared reading) may play a significant role in relation to critical reading.” PsyArXiv Preprints
Shared reading is a great source of rarer or more “academic” words. Preschoolers who use more rare vocabulary words have higher vocabulary scores on norm-referenced vocabulary measures. ASHA American Journal of Speech Pathology
Brains, Bodies, and Language
But what about “everyday language”? How is that developed? Across languages, verbs are acquired in the following order: 1) vision, 2) touch, then 3) hearing. Vision verbs (see, look) are acquired earliest and produced most frequently by children of all ages. Taste and smell verbs were produced less frequently than other perception verbs across the board. Cognitive Science
Speaking of verbs and language related to physical experience: linking language with physical or imagined movement can make it easier for children to grasp what they hear. In other words, children can be taught to improve their listening comprehension skills, as this study shows. Four and five years olds were provided with a listening comprehension intervention that taught them “to align visual and motor processing with language comprehension.”
- As part of the study, they looked at the children’s brain activity using EEG and discovered that the children who improved in listening comprehension also showed changes in the parts of the brain related to movement and visio. This means the brain's motor and visual areas become involved when children are actively working to understand language. The training helped the children to use their visual cortex to imagine what the story was describing, and their motor cortex to imagine the actions suggested by the story. Behavioral Sciences
We’ve looked at some of the research on the surprising–and fascinating–separation of language and cognition in the human brain here on this blog before in Language and Cognition and Thinking Inside and Outside of Language. But clearly, there is a link to some degree between cognition and language.
In a study of people with aphasia (difficulty with language after a brain injury), they found that executive function was related to language ability, with verbal executive function and fluency more strongly linked to micro-linguistic narrative language such as grammar and word choice, while nonverbal executive function plays a more prominent role in macro-level discourse skills like coherence and organization. ASHA American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
When children with developmental language disorder (DLD) received both cognitive and linguistic training, they improved their verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. They also demonstrated far transfer effects of the training (far-transfer refers to the impact of an intervention on abilities that were not directly targeted by the training).
- Most interestingly, the order of interventions affected the results, suggesting that a combined linguistic and cognitive & tailored therapy may be most beneficial. Brain Sciences
“The findings of the current study indicate that the coexistence of ADHD in children with DLD does not exacerbate language and reading difficulties.” CPP Advances
Another study aimed to determine the extent to which oral language development is related to reading speed and accuracy in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. The children with DLD were indeed less accurate and slower in reading than “typically developing” (TD) children. The findings also show that the use of strategies during reading are different between the DLD and TD groups.
- “the network analyses suggest strong and stable connections between reading and oral production in the DLD group. This finding confirms the importance of language abilities for reading acquisition.” Reading Psychology
Speaking of the relationships between oral language and reading: oral language skills are both promotive and protective factors for children with lower reading fluency skills in grade 1.
- “The findings of our study further extend those of previous research, suggesting that while OL skills are important for the reading comprehension skills of all children, individuals with lower reading comprehension skills in G1 benefit the most from strong OL skills.” PsyArXiv Preprints
Poverty impacts a child’s developing brain – and this longitudinal study demonstrates this has a long-term impact on language ability. The findings indicate that the chronic stress of poverty alters the trajectory of neural pathways associated with language in adults. Even when adults from backgrounds of poverty had average language skills, their brains show differences in activation and connectivity patterns compared to adults from middle-income backgrounds. These differences suggest the use of compensatory mechanisms.
“Interestingly income alone did not account for any significant differences in language functioning but educational attainment did. This suggests that language is an important driver in the choice to continue education after growing up in poverty” “
“Greater activation in the poverty group may be indicative of inner speech during word recognition and phonemic decoding of pseudowords, which is a potential compensatory adaptive mechanism.”
This inner speech may be used potentially due to less automatic processing of language. Brain and Language
There’s something interesting about inner speech as a compensatory adaptive mechanism, by the way. Not everyone has an “inner voice” or experiences inner speech in the same way – there is quite a bit of variation. In a study, those with less inner speech have poorer performance on a verbal working memory task and lower accuracy in rhyme judgment tasks. Yet when study participants reported talking out loud, the performance differences between groups disappeared! This suggests that both covert (inner) and overt speech can be used as compensatory mechanisms to support cognitive performance.
- “Understanding how inner speech develops has implications for education.” Scientific American; Psychological Science](https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243004)
Immigration, Multilinguals, and Multilingualism
Now let’s tackle a hot button topic: immigration.
Like so much of our national and political discourse, the topic of immigration is so heightened by emotion that facts and evidence are far removed from policy and perception.
Unfortunately, one source notes that “the contemporary opposition to immigration, and the tendency for it to be stronger among less educated people, are not a reflection of something specific to today, but continue a long-standing pattern.” Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
If you really want to cut through the noise, I highly recommend reading a book released this year by Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration, to ground your understanding of immigrants and immigration in empirical evidence, rather than bias and sensationalism.
I first came across Zeke’s trenchant insights when I listened to a Freakonomics series on immigration (also recommended), “The True Story of America’s Supremely Messed-Up Immigration System.” I decided to check out his book, and am very glad I did. Whatever your priors on immigration may be, you will find something to learn that will surprise you, and educate you, in his book.
Now let’s turn to some more facts and evidence about immigration.
Immigrant children can benefit the learning of others
Newly arrived immigrant children who are English learners have “positive spillover effects” on the test scores of existing students, particularly in reading – even in a “new destination state” such as Delaware, which has seen a sevenfold increase in its EL student population over the past two decades. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
- This builds off of previous research I highlighted in last year’s roundup, which found “significant benefits of having immigrant peers on the test scores of native students, especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.” Brookings
Immigration boosts the economy
“Latin American immigrants are starting businesses at more than twice the rate of the U.S. population as a whole.” Marginal Revolution
“New migrants contribute to economic growth in two ways: by working and by spending.” New Yorker
”...from a strictly budgetary point of view, the new arrivals are more than paying for themselves.” Bloomberg
“Alabama wound up watering down its 2011 restrictions in part because of an outcry from businesses about the loss of workers. Crops rotted in the field. Investment in the state stalled.” NY Times
Undocumented immigrants pay nearly $100 billion in taxes. Bloomberg
When restrictions and deportations of undocumented immigrants are enforced this leads to a reduction in construction labor supply, decreased homebuilding, and ultimately, increased housing prices. SSRN
“By adding millions of new workers to the labor market, the immigration surge has lifted payrolls and growth, and potentially helped keep a lid on consumer prices, according to recent research.” Semafor
While we’re at it, we should note that immigration does not increase crime levels in the communities where immigrants settle. And obtaining legal status decreases immigrants' involvement in criminal activities. Journal of Economic Perspectives
- “As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated.” Stanford Law and Economics
Cultural and linguistic distances can impact immigrant mental health and learning
Immigrants tend to move to places where climates better match what they are accustomed to.
- “we show that climate strongly predicts the spatial distribution of immigrants in the US, both historically (1880) and more recently (2015), whereby movers select destinations with climates similar to their place of origin.” NBER
In Ontario, the greater the linguistic distance between an immigrant’s first language and English, the more elevated their risk of being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Journal of Psychological Medicine
Relatedly, cultural factors can influence how symptoms of psychosis are experienced and expressed.
- “findings seem to indicate that there is not a “one size fits all” approach to quantifying schizophrenia symptoms in multilinguals, but rather a complex interplay of medical and social factors that contribute to symptom expression.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
A common assumption made about more recent immigrants is that “acculturation”—becoming oriented towards mainstream culture–necessarily leads to a decline in heritage language skills. Yet this study found that mothers who maintain a balance of enculturation–or orientation towards their heritage culture–and acculturation in the United States also maintained greater bilingualism in their children.
- “Both mothers’ levels of enculturation and acculturation were significant predictors of the grammaticality of the Spanish utterances produced by the children between the ages of 3 and 4.” Journal of Child Language
Moving between cultural frames more frequently, in fact, may support executive functioning.
- “Bicultural switching effects on interference and inhibition-control persist even in participants at the developmental peak of their cognitive processing capabilities after controlling for a plethora of socio-linguistic variables.” International Journal of Bilingualism
“According to research that confirms past studies, the concern that immigrants and their children do not learn English is misplaced.” Forbes
Children with more diverse social networks also develop more flexible and nuanced speech categorization patterns, adapting to the variability of their linguistic environments. Importantly, whether their adaptive speech processing is perceived as a deficit or an asset depends on how it is measured and analyzed. PsyArXiv preprints
Yet “despite higher exposure to one language, children sometimes identified more with the language and culture they were exposed to less.”
- In fact, this study found that higher exposure to a language does not always align with higher-level skills in that language. High-level skills can also be observed in the language where exposure was quantitatively lower, but qualitatively rich. For example, engaging in activities like reading could provide qualitatively rich exposure and compensate for lower quantitative exposure. PsyArXix
But let’s go back to that concept of “linguistic distance.” Globally, the greater the “discordance” between the language of home and the language of school, the lower the basic literacy rates.
- “If we look at literature from the fields of literacy development and bilingual development, even for monolingual speakers, it is much easier for a child to learn to read and write if they can do that with a script that maps out to their oral language. This is because we start learning language way before we enter school, whereas if a child goes to school and they are confronted with reading a script that does not map out to their language, it is harder for them. If the teacher does not speak their language and does not explain [things] in a way that they understand, it’s harder for them.” Harvard GSE News
Providing an early oral language intervention in students’ home language when that language is more discordant with school language can improve learning.
“The findings indicate that school-based oral language interventions can enhance heritage language proficiency and facilitate skill transfer to specific domains of a second language.” EdArXiv Preprints
For low SES immigrant families in Paris, a shared book reading intervention significantly enhanced children's language skills and the effects persisted in a six month follow-up. For $5 dollars a kid, not a bad deal. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness
A note that we’ve examined the concept of “linguistic distance” on this blog previously, suggesting that when there is a greater distance between the forms of a language that are spoken at home and written in school, this may make it more challenging and complex for young learners to acquire literacy. This applies also to spoken dialects of a written language, such as African American or Black English, Cantonese, or Moroccan Arabic.
The Benefits of Multilingualism
A study in the UK found that although multilingual learners initially face challenges in Key Stage 2, particularly in English and Science, they achieve comparable results with–and often excel over–their monolingual peers by Key Stage 4.
- “Notably, this academic advantage was observed even among students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, suggesting that multilingualism can offset the negative effects of socioeconomic disadvantage and contribute to greater educational equity and social mobility.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
A longitudinal study in Chicago Public Schools demonstrates the importance in disaggregation of English learner data, as there are ELLs who go on to outpace their monolingual peers. For students who have achieved English language proficiency, “They had higher-than-district-average outcomes: cumulative GPAs and SAT scores; high school graduation rate; two-year college enrollment rate; and two-year college persistence rate (among all college enrollees).” University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
- This corresponds to similar data on former ELLs from NYC Public Schools. The Research Alliance for New York City Schools
Learning a new language may even make you better at learning math! Adolescents who received formal instruction in a foreign language were about three times more likely to achieve higher grades in math tests than those who did not. (Note that this does not establish causation.) Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
The conversation about bilingual education programs often focuses on the benefits for students who are learning English. Yet it’s good for English proficient students, too!
- “On average, native English-speaking students in Grades 1 through 4 who win access to a DLI program score higher in reading and math by 0.12 and 0.14 SDs, respectively. The achievement gains in test scores are realized as early as first grade.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Bilingual education isn’t only about spoken languages! In a study of an ASL bilingual program, kids at risk of language deprivation (due to having caregivers who don’t know sign language) who entered the program young achieved the same academic performance as kids who were not at risk (due to having caregivers who use sign language).
- In other words, a bilingual program can act as an early intervention to mitigate the effects of potential language deprivation on academic development! The Journal of Special Education
Yet despite the potential benefits of multilingualism and of bilingual education programs, the United States remains far beyond the rest of the world.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “about 20% of the U.S. population speaks another language other than English, compared to 59% of Europeans who can speak at least a second language”. National Geographic
The European Union states in its language policy that every European citizen should master two or more other languages in addition to their mother tongue. EU Language Policy
Share of kids not learning a foreign language in school US 80% Germany 18% Italy 18% Finland 16% Sweden 8% Spain 4% Poland 2% France 0% Norway 0% Pew Research Center
Cognition and Multilingualism
Working Memory
When solving word problems in math, multilingual learners with a home language of Spanish draw on their working memory systems, which operate across both languages.
- “Results show increased accuracy of targets and generalisation of sounds across languages when treatment was administered only in the L1.” Journal of Educational Psychology
Importantly, the structure of working memory was found to be similar in both monolingual and bilingual children. This now allows for more valid comparisons, generalizable interventions, and can strengthen our theoretical understanding of working memory in both populations. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
In one study, they taught bilingual children (Spanish-English) who were 4 and 5 years old new words paired to objects. In one condition, they taught the label with only English-like words, and in the other, they taught them both Spanish- and English-like words for different objects. They found that the bilingual children learned the words best in the single language condition, suggesting that competition between languages might be a factor affecting learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
This fascinating study finds that better performance of older bilinguals in L2 than L1 on paired associate learning tasks “cannot be accounted for by cognitive decline, but follows straightforwardly from basic principles of learning.” Dimensions of Diffusion and Diversity
Cognitive Flexibility and Task Switching
Learning a second language in adulthood can strengthen neural connections.
- “‘The dynamic changes in brain connectivity were found to be directly correlated with the increase in performance in the language test of the Goethe-Institute,’” emphasized Alfred Anwander, the study’s last author.” Max Planck Institute
That said, there have been conflicting findings about whether learning multiple languages enhances executive function or not. This research article compares studies of the “bilingual advantage” with cognitive training studies and finds them both to be null. The authors argue that if cognitive training does not result in far transfer, then it is unlikely that bilingualism would, unless there was a special status for bilingual language control. International Journal of Bilingualism
Meanwhile, another study replicated a previous finding that bilingualism enhances cognitive flexibility in task switching, specifically by reducing the global switch cost.
- “Overall, findings contributed to the argument that bilingualism does indeed confer a bilingual advantage in task switching, as observed in young adult bilinguals with diverse language experiences.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition
Yet this study cautions that bilingual advantages in cognitive flexibility are not straightforward and can be influenced by both language-related factors and psychological stress.
- “Our findings suggest that advantages in cognitive flexibility are conditional, shedding light on the ongoing debate about the ambiguous relationship between experience and cognitive control in bilinguals.” International Journal of Bilingualism
It may be that intentional code switching may be associated with greater cognitive flexibility, while unintentional switching may be negatively associated with cognitive flexibility.
- “Altogether, our findings indicate that any training instilled by dual-language code-switching is restricted to language-specific cognitive flexibility.” Journal of Cognitive Psychology
Or, it may be that switching between languages while reading can be more or less cognitively costly depending on whether the words are more concrete (with lots of interconnections conceptually between the languages) or abstract (with fewer connections between languages).
“We found that abstract words (e.g., 正确 [correct], wrong) did not show switching costs. . . In contrast, concrete words (e.g., 晴天 [sunny], rainy) elicited significant larger switching costs.”
“in our experiment, the absence of nontarget language activation obviated the need for language control, resulting in no significant switching cost for abstract words, while concrete words incurred larger switching costs because of the high activation level of the nontarget languages.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Neural Connections and Brain Structure
The conflicting accounts of the impact of multilingualism on the brain may be due to the fact that positive effects are more localized.
“Our analysis … suggests that one should not expect to observe a uniform impact of bilingualism across the entire lifespan – there are time-varying effects that emerge, showing that remodeling of white matter is most clearly observed closer to the learning event.”
This study did find that specific white matter tracts associated with language processing showed reliable differences between bilinguals and monolinguals, most particularly in adults.
“converting an effect size for the effect of age on white matter (FA) into an equivalent for these regions from our meta-analysis, allows us to speculate that the effect of bilingualism is equivalent to having white matter that is between 2.31 and 4.65 years younger than expected, a value that neatly aligns with current estimates of bilingualism’s impact on delaying the onset of dementia.” Neuropsychologia
In another study, they found that bilingual children, unlike bilingual adults, show lower FA values in language-related white matter pathways compared to monolingual children, suggesting a slower maturation of these pathways during childhood. Human Brain Mapping
While there may not necessarily be direct cognitive advantages to multilingualism, evidence does show that learning a new language imposes a cognitive burden. I wrote about this research more in depth in my post, Research Highlight 5: Learning In a New Language Takes Effort.
Semantic Representation and Conceptual Change
Learning a new language may also change concepts in your first language. Psychological Science
Another study found that semantic brain representations are largely shared across languages but modulated by each language. These results show that between the two languages, semantic representations are not fully the same, but they’re also not separate: there is a shared semantic system that is modulated by each language! bioRxiv preprint
Multilingual Phonology and Orthography
Phonological Awareness and Speech Perception
As we noted previously, the quality, rather than mere quantity, of linguistic input is what is important. This applies equally when learning a new language. One study suggests that when teaching reading in an L2, focusing on developing clear and specific phonological representations is essential.
“Not the sheer number of words, but their phonological representations (lexical specificity) in the mental lexicon seem to matter most in the early stages of L2 reading comprehension.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
A note that we’ve discussed the concepts of fuzziness and precision in multilingual learner previously in An Ontogenesis Model of Word Learning in a Second Language.
That said, phonological awareness as a skill seems to be more of a language-general construct, rather than only a language-specific one.
“These findings provide evidence that phonological awareness is a language-general skill that supports reading across languages, consistent with the common underlying proficiency model of bilingual reading development.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
“These findings reveal that the neural basis of PA is both shared, as evidenced by the activation of a common left perisylvian network, and language-specific, with greater modulation in the temporal regions for Spanish and in frontal regions for English.” Mind, Brain, and Education
“The portions of the brain that control the muscles needed to make the noises we associate with language aren't especially picky about which language they're handling.” Ars Technica; Nature Biomedical Engineering
So it’s not surprising then that treating bilingual children with speech-sound disorders in their home language of Spanish facilitates progress of similar sounds in English. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
Though it also may be that bilingual children develop two distinct phonological systems that interact with each other, and the specific patterns of acquisition in each language are influenced by the frequency of phonological features in the input. International Journal of Bilingualism
“our findings support the idea that phonological transfer might be possible even between languages with very different phonological structures.” Reading and Writing
Sound Discrimination and Learning
Yet how we discriminate sounds between languages can be based on how we learn them.
This study looked at how people who speak three languages (trilinguals) can tell the difference between sounds in their different languages. They found that people were better at recognizing sounds in their first language compared to their second or third languages. And unsurprisingly, the study found that the more someone knows a language, the better they are at recognizing sounds in that language.
Those who learned languages through social immersion (like living in a country where that language is spoken) showed better sound discrimination than those in formal classrooms. Naturalistic learners processed L1 and L2 sounds similarly, unlike formal learners who showed clear differences across all three languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
It’s possible that the multilingual brain processes word similarities from a new language to their first language at different speeds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Speaking of learning something new: articulating a new word out loud for children facilitates learning of that word more than if you just passively receive it.
- When students are learning a new language, saying new words out loud is even more important! The researchers suspect that this is because it requires more mental effort. Memory & Cognition
Word Learning and Spelling
Similarly, word learning in a new language is further facilitated (just as it is in your first language) by pairing the sounds to the words in print.
“In both experiments, orthographic facilitation was found in both less and more advanced readers. . . Our results can be explained by the strong interplay between orthographic and phonological processing: phonological representations are quickly and automatically activated upon the presentation of a written word. Just as with L1, L2 word learning is facilitated by pairing sounds to words in print.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
We conclude that both English monolingual and bilingual children learn more novel words when the spellings of words are present, and that this benefit does not appear to be larger for bilingual children.” Reading and Writing
In terms of spelling, one study found that cross-linguistic influence of spelling errors was mostly unidirectional. Children typically made errors in one language due to influence from the other but did not make similar errors in both languages.
“even if dual language learners did have balanced oral language skills, they may develop the spelling patterns of the two languages at different rates.”
This is significant because it shows that spelling development is not simply a reflection of oral proficiency. It is also influenced by factors like: the characteristics of each language’s writing system, the type of instruction received, and a learner’s stage of development. Reading and Writing
Multilingual Learning and Instruction
Building on Home Languages
Translanguaging has become a ubiquitous term in the field. Yet it’s not always clear exactly what the term means in practice, nor in terms of its evidence base.
“Translanguaging, which has taken on an air of orthodoxy in applied linguistics and language education, may now be immutably associated with deconstructivism, making a return to its earlier meaning difficult to achieve with adequate clarity.” International Journal of Bilingualism
“the notion of translanguaging has been very successfully marketed . . . there are no diagnostic criteria against which researchers can check multilingual practices and decide whether or not these count as translanguaging.” Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Yet what we do know–as research in other sections has already pointed out–is that supporting an English learner’s skills and knowledge in their home language supports their language and literacy development in English.
“The findings further suggest that supporting heritage-language literacy may further strengthen emerging bilinguals’ literacy development across their languages.”
In this study of Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals, they found direct longitudinal transfer of phonological awareness skills from the heritage language (Spanish or Chinese) to English for both groups of bilinguals – which again suggests, as we examined previously, that phonological awareness is a language-general skill that can be readily transferred between languages.
On the other hand, morphological awareness appeared more language-specific than phonological awareness. Morphological awareness transfer is more complex and depends on the structural similarities between the languages involved.
“literacy instruction that includes systematic phonological, morphological and orthographic training is critical for bilingual and monolingual speakers.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
A study shows that for Korean-speaking adolescents, morphological awareness in Korean boosts reading comprehension in both Korean and English. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
“Notably, oral language and reading skills in both MLs’ first language and in English were essential components of the SOR for MLs.” Educational Psychology Review
English Learner Reading Profiles
For students who are learning English in English only environments, the task of learning then becomes more challenging. The Simple View of Reading was used in one study to distinguish English learner reading profiles with a home language of Spanish from English proficient reading profiles.
Unsurprisingly, proficient English speakers were more likely to be in the typically developing and poor decoder/good Listening Comprehension (LC) profiles, while Spanish-speaking ELs were more likely to be in the good decoder/poor LC and poor decoder/poor LC profiles. Unsurprising, because regardless of whether an EL is good at decoding or not, they are by definition learning English.
So if they need more decoding support or intervention, they will need BOTH decoding and comprehension support at the same time. Reading and Writing
I went far more in-depth into the reading profiles of English learners in my post, Research Highlight 3: The Reading Profiles of English Learners.
Linguistic Proficiency and Reading Intervention
Speaking of intervention, a critically important study of 6th and 7th grade multilingual learners with reading difficulties found that providing intensive intervention in English reading was only effective when students had “relatively strong English proficiency.”
This is important because there is a tendency in the field right now to put newly arrived immigrant students into reading intervention, rather than ensuring that they are receiving comprehensive language-rich instruction through all their Tier 1 content areas.
“These findings highlight once again the importance of linguistic proficiency to students' reading achievement and suggest that without linguistic proficiency even an intensive and extensive intervention may not meet students' reading needs. . . We interpret this suggestion as a rationale for more intensive language and literacy supports beyond the context of a tier 2 intervention and into tier 1 content area classes.” Learning and Individual Differences
Conversations and Incidental Learning
For early childhood programs, “the findings suggest the importance of improving opportunities and providing more support for emergent bilinguals to engage in conversational turn-taking with their teachers and peers.” Early Childhood Education Journal
One review of corpora, both student talk and lessons, in English classes at a university in Vietnam found that student talk is an excellent source for the incidental learning of high-frequency word families and a good source for learning core formulaic sequences, as well as provides opportunities for both spaced repetition and varied repetition, which are crucial for vocabulary learning. They found that knowledge of the most frequent 1000-word families is needed for reasonable comprehension of student talk. The Language Learning Journa
“. . . overall, interaction is a key source of L2 receptive vocabulary development.” International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
Balancing Explicit and Implicit Learning
A study of Japanese students learning English highlights the need for pedagogy to assist second language learners in achieving both declarative (explicit, conscious understanding) and automatized phonological vocabulary knowledge.
They found that declarative knowledge of phonological vocabulary is linked to more formal classroom-based training and working memory, while automatized knowledge is more strongly associated with extracurricular activities that expose learners to auditory materials and provide more real-world language experiences (such as study abroad).
“For effective L2 learning, it is imperative that teachers not only emphasize explicit word comprehension but also provide abundant practice to foster knowledge automatization.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
I’ve explored the importance of automatization in language learning in the post, Research Highlight 1: The Importance of Automatization in Learning a New Language.
Finding the right balance between explicit and implicit learning requires that we more precisely identify the highest leverage items that must be taught explicitly. For Spanish speakers in third grade, explicitly teaching novel suffixes was far more effective than mere exposure.
- “At both testing points (i.e., immediate and delayed post-test), explicit instruction yielded better results for the learning of the form of the suffixes compared to implicit instruction.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
In a study with university students learning a new language, they found a reciprocal relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge.
“The strongest predictor of current explicit knowledge was prior explicit knowledge; the strongest predictor of current implicit knowledge was prior implicit knowledge.”
“The results from an autoregressive cross-lag analysis suggest L2 explicit and implicit knowledge influenced each other reciprocally over time. Neither activity type predicted knowledge development. We conclude that language acquisition is a developmental process typified by a dynamic, synergistic interface between explicit and implicit knowledge.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
One method to support incidental vocabulary learning is through the addition of captions to videos. This benefits “intermediate-level” learners the most, suggesting that additional scaffolds would be needed for lower proficiency learners.
- “The results showed a medium effect of captioning on L2 vocabulary learning.” Language Learning
Speaking of implicit learning: you’re never too old to implicitly learn a new language!
- “Given that implicit language learning mechanisms are shown to be preserved over the lifespan, the present data provide crucial support for the assumptions underlying claims that language learning interventions in older age could be leveraged as a targeted intervention to help build or maintain resilience to age-related cognitive decline.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
Though it might help your learning of the new language if you deplete your cognitive resources first!
- “late-developing cognitive control abilities, and in particular attentional control, constitute an important antagonist of implicit learning behavior relevant for language acquisition.” Journal of Experimental Psychology-General
All of that said, a reminder that explicit instruction is a powerful means to direct learning and can act as a shortcut to achieving the same neural representation that would have been formed through implicit learning. Nature
And learning a new language is also aided by . . . sleep.
- “By demonstrating how specific neural processes during sleep support memory consolidation, we provide a new perspective on how sleep disruption impacts language learning...Sleep is not just restful; it’s an active, transformative state for the brain.” SciTechDaily
A note that I’ve discussed the balance between explicit and implicit learning more in-depth in relation to AI in my post, LLMs, Statistical Learning, and Explicit Teaching.
Assessing and Diagnosing Language Skills with Multilingual Learners
Gathering and analyzing the language samples of children can be a really useful way to learn more about their language use.
They can help you to better understand dialectal differences.
- “the findings from this study underscore the potential use of language sample analysis in describing linguistic patterns to support the characterisation of communication profiles for culturally and linguistically diverse children.” Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
And they can help you to better distinguish between developmental language disorder and typical language development in multilingual learners.
“Results of this study provide evidence of the clinical utility of LSA in differentiating between DLD and TL in bilingual children.” ASHA Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
For Spanish-English bilingual children, mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) seem to have the greatest diagnostic accuracy. ASHA Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools
Gaining greater diagnostic accuracy with multilingual learners is important, because how they perform on a vocabulary and listening comprehension test may be due more to the specific test items, rather than differences between the children themselves!
- “These results indicate a need for careful and deep investigation into assessment and item factors that influence item response accuracies in oral language tasks.” ASHA Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Multilingual learners in preschool who are identified with DLD may be less likely to be dominant in their home language in comparison to MLs without DLD.
- “all bilinguals with better selective attention more often had balanced vocabularies in both languages, while those with compromised selective attention coupled with poorer L1 speech tended toward L2 dominance.” Research in Developmental Disabilities
Rhythm, Attention, and Memory
In this section, we’ll continue to examine some research related to multilingualism, but there was an interesting few additional themes and other studies that came up around music, synchrony, and the role of attention and memory in learning.
We Learn Through Rhythm
The Synchrony of Learning
There are patterns of different oscillations and rhythms across the layers of the brain.
- “we suspect that different pathologies of synchrony may contribute to many brain disorders, including disorders of perception, attention, memory, and motor control.” Science Daily
Interbrain synchrony is linked with better learning.
“The better their brain waves synchronized, the better they performed these tasks as a group.” Quanta Magazine
“In all, the similar neural representations and interbrain synchronization between co-learners suggest that co-learning companionship offers important benefits for learning words in a new language.” Cerebral Cortex
“in multilingual contexts, the activation of synchronization processes involving both linguistic and non-linguistic mechanisms...is necessary to enable effective linguistic communication, comprehension and translation. . . . [Furthermore] some studies have indicated heightened activation in the motor cortex during L2 processing compared to L1.” Imminent
Music
That heightened activation in the motor context suggests that gesture, movement, and music can support the learning of languages.
“The infants who were randomly assigned to complete the music intervention showed enhanced brain responses that reflected detection of small differences in not only musical sounds, but also speech sounds.” Science
“The available evidence suggests that musical ability is indeed positively related to second-language learning, even after factoring in publication bias revealed by the meta-analysis.” PsyArXiv Preprints
“The musicians performed better than the non-musicians on Cantonese phonological awareness, Cantonese tone awareness, and English phonological awareness.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
And yet, music may not be “derivative of speech—it serves its own purpose.” Scientific American
Playing music may help keep your brain young. PLOS One
Movement and Rhythm
When it comes to rhythm, there’s a goldilocks equation: moderate syncopation makes people want to dance, while too much or too little does not. Scientific American; Science Advances
If you’ve ever thought there is a rhythm to writing, this study on how children learn to write backs you up – and shows that there is even “an internal representation of the rhythm of handwriting [that] is available before the age in which handwriting is performed automatically.” Nature
And when it comes to movement, the cerebellum–once thought to only control body movement–connects to so much more!
- “These new, groundbreaking studies show that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex social and emotional behavior.” Wired
Attention and Memory
“Our work suggests that sustained attention acts like a gatekeeper, controlling what “gets in” to children’s long-term memory—and the gate to memory remains shut more often in children. These novel findings raise the possibility that differences in sustained attention may explain broad differences in cognitive performance and that to boost children’s learning we must first help them to effectively sustain attention.” Well, yeah. That's the hard part. Psychological Science
We certainly don’t help children focus with all the clutter we put on our walls in classrooms. Classroom decorations can overwhelm students’ working memory and attention. Learning and the Brain
The good news is that purely visual distractions are easy to get rid of, and researchers have found that children's working memory is not significantly more affected by multisensory distractions (visual and auditory) than by purely visual distractions.
- “children’s working memory – which is fundamental to learning – is more robust to interference than we might think.” Bold
Spacing and Interleaving Learning
One of the most robust findings in the body of science of learning is that of the “testing effect” on learning.
There were a number of studies this year further examining retrieval, spacing, and interleaving practice.
Students most typically try to cram all their studying for tests the night before. This is termed “massed practice.” While it might be fine for one-off learning, cramming won’t get you far in medical school, where you need to be able to retain and build upon that learning – and ultimately, be able to apply it in medical practice. This more distant application to novel experiences is termed “far transfer.” But is “blocking” the practice, or “interleaving” the practice more effective for far transfer?
- “giving students practice with multiple contexts seems to be particularly important for far transfer, and when that happens, interleaving the examples is better than blocking.” The Learning Scientists
Retrieval practice (i.e. flashcards) isn’t so bad with easy stuff. But when it gets more difficult, students tend to avoid it. This study shows that if you explain the benefits of retrieval practice for both easy and difficult items in the long run, students are more likely to do retrieval practice even with difficult items. Educational Psychology Review
“both spacing and variability can benefit memory, depending on what aspect of an experience you are trying to remember.” Scientific American
There is great potential for spaced retrieval to support vocabulary development for students with DLD, but there is still quite a bit to figure out to make it most effective.
Spaced retrieval can help to prevent the erosion of phonetic details in word recall, which is particularly beneficial for children with DLD—who may otherwise experience a decline in phonetic accuracy over time.
Spaced retrieval is most effective when it integrates immediate retrieval, provides consistent spacing, and includes feedback, helping to enhance long-term word recall and preserve phonetic details in children with DLD.
Future research should clarify the optimal spacing between retrieval attempts and whether gradually increasing this spacing is necessary for long-term retention. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments
Individual differences play a role with testing effects. It all has to do with how much working memory is available – some of us have more WM than others.
This paper theorizes that when we are tested on something, working memory is needed both in the attempt to retrieve the information and then to re-encode and further solidify it.
Individuals with lower WM may find that after retrieving the information, they don’t have enough WM left for re-encoding.
The model suggests that testing should be challenging enough to engage working memory, but not so difficult that it overwhelms it, which relates to the concept of “desirable difficulty.”
Providing feedback after a retrieval attempt may help to reduce the working memory load, allowing those with lower WM to benefit more from testing. NPJ Science of Learning
In a study with mice, they found that rest periods after learning helps to integrate new memories with older ones. Nature
Researchers examined how mathematical procedural complexity interacts with spacing retrieval practice.
The study found no evidence that the spacing effect is less effective for more complex material (when complexity is defined as the number of steps in a procedure).
“The spacing effect is robust to variations in procedural complexity and supports its use in the teaching and learning of mathematics.” PsyArXiv Preprints
Testing can even be beneficial before you’ve learned something! This is called “pretesting.”
“keep in mind that it works best when the questions are focused on information that will be covered in what you’re about to learn.”
“take the pre-quiz shortly before engaging with the learning material. . . you can ‘turn learning objectives into questions and attempt to answer them before exploring the content.’”
“including incorrect but closely related answer options in a multiple-choice test format can help direct your attention.”
There was this nugget in the article that could help reframe the direct instruction vs. inquiry-based learning debate: “Another guessing-based strategy that has proven effective, often in group learning, is known as ‘productive failure’. In subjects like mathematics, it involves encouraging learners to attempt solving problems before receiving formal instruction – and again there’s evidence that this form of guessing can result in better outcomes than instruction alone.”
In other words, inquiry-based math learning could be effective, when structured well, in the sense of this pre-testing effect – rather than being viewed as about “discovery.” Psyche
School, Social-Emotional, and Contextual Effects
School Effects
OK, I know these books by Karin Chenoweth weren’t published in 2024, but I happened to finally come around to reading them in 2024, and I highly recommend them, as well as the podcast: Schools That Succeed, Districts That Succeed.
Why do I recommend these? Because Chenoweth reminds us that schools can serve the most vulnerable students and communities and make a tremendous impact as evidenced by the hard data – and that the means to do so are not mystical: A culture of high expectations and belief in kids, transparent data-based inquiry, committed and sustained leadership, and coherent school organization and scheduling.
Illustrative quotes:
“Nowhere are a school's values and priorities more on display than in a school's master schedule,.”
“Schools that go...from serving mostly white middle-class students to serving mostly low-income students or new immigrants are often revealed as institutions that are not in and of themselves 'good schools'.”
But do school reforms have long-term effects?
- “We find little evidence to support improved long-run student outcomes – mostly null effects that are nearly zero in magnitude. Our results contribute to a broad call for educational researchers to examine whether school reforms meaningfully affect student outcomes beyond short-term improvements in test scores.” EdWorkingPapers
Well, getting a college degree still matters.
- Almost 70 percent of overdoses in the United States occur in people without a college degree. JAMA Health Forum
And early childhood programs have multifaceted positive effects, despite the critiques around “fade-out” effects.
In fact, the fade-out effect is the very reason to continue to invest in early childhood programs, according to one study. That’s because the effect is linked to the share of classmates who also attended preschool, and increasing the number of children attending preschool would help reduce this fade-out effect by creating a stronger social network and support system.
“human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.” NBER
Another study suggests that the main benefit of early childhood programs is actually for parents.
“UPK enrollment increases parent earnings by 21.7% during pre-kindergarten, and gains persist for at least six years after pre-kindergarten. Gains are largest for middle-income families.” NBER
“Consistent with an increase in overall economic activity, places that introduced Universal Pre-K also had larger increases in new business applications and the number of establishments than places that did not” Whitehouse Issue Brief
How we measure teacher effects is important. For a long time, we have been focused on test-based effects. But according to this study, test-based measures are more aligned with high-achieving students and outcome-based measures like SAT scores and AP test performance, while non-test measures better predict outcomes related to college enrollment and high school graduation, and may be especially important for students who are at risk of not enrolling in college or not graduating from high school.
- “the results of this study suggest that it is nontest teacher quality that is especially relevant for disadvantaged students and that gaps in access to effective teachers along the nontest dimension would be even greater cause for concern.” Journal of Human Resources
If we want to decrease achievement gaps, we need to focus less on “homework help” or enrichment programs, and more on classroom management, challenging content with a high degree of support, heterogenous grouping, and tutoring. Studies in Educational Evaluation
Social-Emotional Effects
Social-emotional neglect has serious consequences for child development.
- “Over the course of 20 years, we have consistently demonstrated that even when a child’s physical needs are met, psychosocial neglect is deleterious to brain and behavioral development.” Current Directions in Psychological Science
“Being bullied as a child worsens well-being and labour market performance up to half a century later. It lowers the probability of having a job throughout adulthood and raises the probability of premature death.” Social Science & Medicine
For students with ADHD in Switzerland, targeting social-emotional skills through the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) program had persistent positive effects lasting over a decade. Treated children were more likely to complete academic high school and enroll in university. The Review of Economic Studies
Yet “ boosting social-emotional skills, like boosting cognitive skills, does not appear to be a silver-bullet solution to changing children's developmental trajectories.”
- “While it makes sense that stronger social-emotional skills should set children up for success and that boosting these skills should have enduring & cascading effects, our findings suggest that these developmental processes are likely much messier than is commonly expected. Psychological Bulletin
When physical education teachers and students took an “autonomy-supportive” workshop, the effects of autonomy-supportive teacher moved into reports of more autonomy-supportive parenting.
- “Autonomy-supportive teaching increased students’ mid-year prosocial behavior, which increased end-year autonomy-supportive parenting.” Teaching and Teacher Education
Contextual Effects
“after a boost in library capital investment, reading test scores steadily increased.” American Economic Association
An RCT in Germany gave 11-12 year olds e-book readers with free access to digital books. Their reading increased, which led to improved academic performance in reading and math, and enhanced well-being. IZA Institute of Labor Economics
On the importance of being outside
Did you know that there is a global epidemic of myopia in children? The solution is simple: kids need to spend more time outdoors.
“School schedules need to build in outdoor time. Schools themselves should be designed to provide outdoor space for students” Wired, Science Based Medicine
In fact, both adults and children need to stop sitting so much!.
“What the vast majority of adults and children need to do is move more and sit less.” Scientific American
A reminder that I’ve done a deep dive previously into the related importance of greenery to health and learning: The Influence of Greenery on Learning.
Where You Live Matters
“Growing up in a thriving community — where the adults are employed, in good health, etc. — dramatically improves children’s outcomes, even holding fixed their own family’s situation.” NBER
“we find that neighborhood human capital at the community level has the greatest impact on mobility, followed by the street, district, county, and province levels, respectively.” Social Indicators Research
“By equalizing average neighborhood quality for Black and White families, we estimate that the Army’s quasi-random assignment reduces Black-white earnings gaps among the children of Army personnel by 23%.” NBER
“For Black students, these relationships imply that they would receive more beneficial services in a school that was more racially integrated than in one that was fully segregated, highlighting another potential negative consequence of racial segregation.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
NYC “middle school students exposed to more diverse peers apply to and enroll in high schools that are also more diverse. These effects particularly benefit Black and Hispanic students who, as a result, enroll in higher value-added high schools.” NBER
“20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the same gender in their grade go on to live in census tracts with more Black residents...the effect on residential choice appears to come from a change in preferences among Whites.” Journal of Public Economics
Contrary to misconceptions of public housing, this paper examines the impact of growing up in public housing for NYC and finds improved economic outcomes, reduced reliance on safety nets, and a cost effective public investment.
- Furthermore, public housing developments in neighborhoods with higher household incomes or fewer renters have better outcomes for children. United States Census Bureau
Gun violence is hyperlocal.
“Just 4% of NYC’s 120,000 blocks...account for nearly all the city's shootings” from 2020-24. Gothamist
“Instead of people, she says, we should be looking at places. . . in study after study, South has shown that simple investments in the environment . . . lower gun violence in the surrounding blocks by as much as 29 percent.” Philly Mag
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you are a true research nerd! Wishing you a very happy new year of more learning and inquiry.
#language #literacy #research #cognition #reading #writing #multilingualism #assessment #brain #cognition #academics #curriculum #wrapup