Browsing by Author "Hannon, Joelle"

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    Contributions of Procedural Memory to Emergent Reading in Older Children
    (2023-09-21) Hannon, Joelle; Zinszer, Benjamin; Kouadio, Elise; Tanoh, Fabrice; Earle, Sayako; Jasińska, Kaja
    Research on emergent reading has focused almost exclusively on children who begin learning to read by age 5-6, despite the fact that many children around the world begin learning to read later in childhood. Little is known about how older children learn to read for the first time. Importantly, procedural learning supports children’s ability to acquire new skills implicitly and apply those skills with automaticity. Procedural learning is therefore thought to support early reading and reading-related skills, such as phonological awareness. However, as children age they may become less reliant on procedural learning. Older children learn new language skills through largely explicit memorization as opposed to implicit procedural learning, and the same is potentially true for language adjacent skills such as reading. Older children may rely less on procedurally supported phonological awareness when reading for the first time and instead rely on explicit skills such as vocabulary. We examined the role of procedural learning in emergent reading across different ages (9-15 years), focusing on low-literacy communities in rural Côte d’Ivoire, where many children remain in emergent stages of reading even at the end of primary school and age for grade is highly variable. We find that the relation between phonological awareness and reading, and vocabulary and reading among older emergent readers depends on procedural learning.
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    Does non-linguistic segmentation still predict literacy in an L2 education? Statistical learning in Ivorian primary schools
    (2023-02-22) Zinszer, Benjamin; Hannon, Joelle; Kouadio, Élise; AKPE, Yapo Hermann; Tanoh, Fabrice; Hu, Anqi; Qi, Zhenghan; Jasińska, Kaja
    Statistical learning (SL) is a learning mechanism that does not directly depend on knowledge of a language, but predicts language and literacy outcomes for children and adults. Research linking SL and literacy has not addressed children who first learn to read in their second language (L2), common in primary schools worldwide. Several studies have linked SL with childhood literacy in Australia, China, Europe, and the U.S., and we pre-registered an adaptation for Côte d’Ivoire, where students are educated in French and speak a local language at home. Recruiting 117 sixth- graders from primary schools in several villages, we tested for correlations >0.3 between SL and literacy with 80-90% power. We found no evidence for these correlations, but visual SL was correlated with L2 phonological awareness. Although this finding may suggest a role of SL in emergent L2 skills, it underscores the need to include L2 acquisition contexts in literacy research.
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    Home learning environment and physical development impact children’s executive function development and literacy in rural Côte d’Ivoire
    (2022-04-28) Jasińska, Kaja; Zinszer, Benjamin; Xu, Zizhuo; Hannon, Joelle; Seri, Axel, Blahoua; Tanoh, Fabrice; Akpe, Yapo, Hermann
    Socio-economic status (SES) is closely linked to children’s reading development. Previous research suggests that executive functions (EF) mediate the effects of SES on reading, however, this research has almost exclusively focused on high-income countries (HICs). Comparatively less is known about the mechanisms that link SES and literacy in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). Childhood experiences of poverty in LMICs have been consistently linked to cognitive development through two sets of predictors: nutrition and physical growth, and the availability of educational scaffolding at home. The influence of the home learning environment (i.e. material deprivation, types of caregiver interactions) and nutrition to support children’s physical development (i.e. children’s BMI and stature for their age) on EF and literacy was examined in 630 primary-school children (6-14 years) in rural Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Structural equation modeling revealed that SES had an indirect effect on EF via the home learning environment, and in turn, reading. Importantly, the home learning environment, and a child’s physical development and nutrition showed distinct contributions to EF. The results suggest that improved educational scaffolding at home and supplemented nutrition could support EF development and reduce the negative impact of socioeconomic risk factors on reading.
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    La segmentation non linguistique permet-elle de prédire l'alphabétisation dans un enseignement en seconde langue (L2) ? L'apprentissage statistique dans les écoles primaires ivoiriennes
    (2023-06-16) Zinszer, Benjamin; Hannon, Joelle; Kouadio, Aya, Élise; Akpé, Hermann; Tanoh, Fabrice; Hu, Anqi; Qi, Zhenghan; Jasińskaf, Kaja
    L’Apprentissage Statistique (SL) est un mécanisme d’apprentissage qui ne dépend pas directement de la connaissance d’une langue, mais prédit des résultats de langage et d’alphabétisation pour enfants et adultes. Les recherches liant l’apprentissage statistique et alphabétisation n’ont pas concerné les enfants qui apprennent pour la première fois à lire dans leur seconde langue (L2), commune dans les écoles primaires à travers le monde entier. Plusieurs études ont établi un lien entre la seconde langue et l’alphabétisation des enfants en Australie, en Chine, en Europe, et les États Unis., et nous avons préenregistré une adaptation pour la Côte d’Ivoire, où des enfants sont scolarisés en français et parlent une langue locale à la maison. Après avoir recruté 117 élèves en classe de CM2 des écoles primaires de plusieurs villages, nous avons fait le test pour des corrélations supérieures à 0,3 entre la langue maternelle et alphabétisation avec un taux allant de 80 et 90%. Nous n’avons trouvé aucune preuve pour ces corrélations, mais l’apprentissage statistique visuel (VSL) a été corrélé avec la conscience phonologique en seconde langue (L2). Bien que ce résultat puisse suggérer un rôle de la seconde langue dans les compétences émergentes en seconde langue (L2), il souligne la nécessité d'inclure les contextes d'acquisition de la seconde langue (L2) dans la recherche sur l'alphabétisation. Cet article est une traduction de : "Does non-linguistic segmentation still predict literacy in an L2 education? Statistical learning in Ivorian primary schools" https://osf.io/preprints/africarxiv/fg8s9/
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    Modeling the associations between socioeconomic risk factors, executive function components, and reading among children in rural Côte d’Ivoire
    (2023-07-06) Khan, Faryal; Wortsman, Brooke; Whitehead, Hannah; Hannon, Joelle; Sulik, Michael; Tanoh, Fabrice; Akpe, Hermann; Ogan, Amy; Obradović, Jelena; Jasińska, Kaja
    Executive Functions (EF; inhibitory control [IC], cognitive flexibility [CF] and working memory [WM]) mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and reading. However, little is known of the roles of individual EF components in mediating the socioeconomic-reading achievement gap, especially in low- and middle-income countries. In Côte d’Ivoire, children experience many socioeconomic disadvantages (i.e., fewer household resources, maternal illiteracy), and kinship fostering (child in care of extended family while parents pursue economic opportunities elsewhere) is prevalent. This study examines the relation between EF components, socioeconomic risks, and reading among 5th grade children in rural Côte d’Ivoire (N=369). Poorer WM mediated the relationship between higher cumulative socioeconomic risk (poverty, maternal illiteracy, fostering) and lower reading scores. Further, WM fully mediated the negative effects of fostering risk on reading scores. Results suggest that EF components are differentially impacted by environmental socioeconomic risks and play different roles in supporting reading development.
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    Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire
    (2020-08-30) Zinszer, Benjamin; Hannon, Joelle; Hu, Anqi; Kouadio, Aya, Élise; Akpe, Yapo, Hermann; Tanoh, Fabrice; Wang, Madeleine; Qi, Zhenghan; Jasińska, Kaja
    Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying ages and literacy skills. Across three iteratively-developed experiments, 157 children, age 8-15 years, in rural communities in the greater-Adzópe region of Côte d’Ivoire watched sequences of cartoon images with embedded triplet patterns on touchscreen tablets, while performing a target-detection task. We assessed these tablet-based adaptations of non-linguistic visual SL and asked whether the children’s individual differences in performance on the SL tasks were related to their first and second language and literacy skills. We found group-level evidence that children used the statistical regularities in the image sequence to gradually decrease their response times, but their responses on post-test discrimination did not reflect this learning. When evaluating the correlation between SL and language skills, individual differences related to other task demands predicted oral language skills shared by first and second languages, while SL better predicted second language print skills. These findings suggest that non-linguistic SL paradigms can measure similar skills in Ivorian children as previous samples, but they also echo recent calls for further cross-cultural validation, greater internal reliability, and tests for confounding variables (such as processing speed) in studies of individual differences in statistical learning.