Can one written word mean many things? Prereaders’ assumptions about the stability of written words’ meanings

Results of three experiments confirmed previous findings that in a moving word task, prereaders 3 to 5 years of age judge as if the meaning of a written word changes when it moves from a matching to a nonmatching toy (e.g., when the word “dog” moves from a dog to a boat). We explore under what circumstances children make such errors, we identify new conditions under which children were more likely correctly to treat written words’ meanings as stable: when the word was placed alongside a nonmatching toy without having been alongside a matching toy previously, when two words were moved from a matching toy to a nonmatching toy, and when children were asked to change what the print said. Under these conditions, children more frequently assumed that physical forms had stable meanings as they do with other forms of external representation

Ontario Teachers’ Perceptions of the Controversial Update to Sexual Health and Human Development

This article reports the findings of a web-based survey of Ontario health and physical education teachers conducted in 2017. The purpose of the study was to understand teachers’ views of the aims of the 2015 revised “sex ed” curriculum and the public debate that surrounded it, as well as to explore their own values around the teaching of sexuality. The respondents overwhelmingly supported the curriculum, expressed liberal values thatincluded respect and inclusion, and called for more education to integrate comprehensive sexuality education into the school system. The findings are relevant to ongoing political battles focused on education in Ontario and across Canada

Bilinguialism Gives Children Cognitive Advantage

Bilingual children perform better than monolingual children in tasks that demand executive control. They are able to focus better on a task, in the presence of distractions.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

A Twenty-Minute Walk Through Fallujah: Using Virtual Reality to Raise Awareness about IEDs in Iraq

In January 2018, filmmakers from the studio NowHere Media travelled to Fallujah, Iraq, with the objective of creating a virtual reality (VR) experience to explain how improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are impacting people’s safe return home. In just a few days, they met dozens of people, all of whom had stories to tell. And then they met Ahmaeid—an Iraqi father who had returned home with his family about a year earlier. Ahmaied told them about the tragic accident that had happened just a few months prior when his two older sons entered a neighbor\u27s home to collect wood and set off an IED. Both young men lost their lives in the explosion. Working with a translator from the region and a local crew, and with Ahmaied’s permission, NowHere Media and the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) created the immersive VR experience “Home After War” to tell his story

Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children’s conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3 to 6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the truth, and be relevant and polite). Though comparatively delayed in their L2 vocabulary, children who were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian (with Slovenian as the dominant language) generally outperformed those who were either monolingual in Italian or Slovenian. We suggest that bilingualism can be accompanied by an enhanced ability to appreciate effective communicative responses

The universality of symbolic representation for reading in Asian and alphabetic languages

Neuroimaging studies of reading have identified unique patterns of activation for individuals reading in alphabetic and Asian languages, suggesting the involvement of different processes in each. The present study investigates the extent to which a cognitive prerequisite for reading, the understanding of the symbolic function of print, is common to children learning to read in these two different systems. Four-year-old children in Hong Kong learning to read in Cantonese and children in Canada learning to read in English are compared for their understanding of this concept by means of the moving word task. Children in both settings performed the same on the task, indicating similar levels of progress in spite of experience with very different writing systems. In addition, the children in Hong Kong benefited from the structural similarity between certain iconic characters and their referents, making these items easier than arbitrary characters. These results point to an important cognitive universal in the development of literacy for all children that is the foundation for skilled reading that later becomes diverse and specialized

How iconic are Chinese characters?

The study explores the notion that some Chinese characters contain pictorial indications of meanings that can be used to help retrieve the referent. Thirty adults with no prior knowledge of Chinese guessed the meanings of twenty Chinese characters by choosing between one of two photographs. Half of the characters were considered to be iconic and the other half was considered to be arbitrary. The proportion of correct guesses for iconic characters was high, but the proportion for arbitrary characters was at chance. These results show a distinction between characters based on the extent to which they have retained aspects of iconicity in reference to their concepts that can direct the reader to their meaning. The results have implications for using pictures to promote the understanding of the orthographic–semantic process in simple Chinese characters

Common and distinct cognitive bases for reading in English–Cantonese bilinguals

The study explores the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading for bilingual children learning to read in two languages that use different writing systems. Participants were 57 Cantonese–English bilingual 6-year-olds who were learning to read in both languages. The children completed cognitive measures, phonological awareness tasks, and word identification tests in both languages. Once cognitive abilities had been controlled, there was no correlation in word identification ability performance across languages, but the correspondence in phonological awareness measures remained strong. This pattern was confirmed by a principal components analysis and hierarchical regression that demonstrated a different role for each phonological awareness factor in reading performance in each language. The results indicate that phonological awareness depends on a set of cognitive abilities that is applied generally across languages and that early reading depends on a common set of cognitive abilities in conjunction with skills specific to different writing systems