Global Compact for EC Development
https://www.nyas.org/history-highlights/contents/events/global-compact-for-early-childhood-development-first-meeting-of-early-adopter-cities
April 2017
https://www.nyas.org/media/14740/gcecd-presentation_v7.pdf
Advancing Early Childhood Development: from Science to Scale
October 4, 2016
https://www.thelancet.com/series/ECD2016
Tablets and smartphones damage toddlers’ speech development
May 4, 2017
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/05/04/tablets-smartphones-damage-toddlers-speech-development
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/04/health/babies-screen-time-speech-delays-study/index.html
using a small number of words (52 actively used words by 16 months of age) in concert with situational context to communicate effectively in a wide range of day-to-day situations
From a more technical standpoint, the fundamental meaningful unit in a language isn’t the word but the morpheme, a word’s more basic constituents.
p71
The Word Birth Browser was developed in Java, retrieving data from a local SQLite3 database containing a version of the corpus.
p88
Dromi notes that in the weeks of decreasing vocabulary growth rate, her daughter seemed to be exploring the words she had already learned, refining their use, and generally consolidating the lexicon. We find this a compelling idea, and since our first analysis in (Roy et al., 2009) we have wondered whether the drop in word birth rate could coincide with an increase in the child’s use of syntax.
p94
It is hard to imagine that with 669 words the child’s communicative needs are satisfied. Then again, the child has responsive caregivers and the range of activities in a 9{24 month old’s life are limited. The introduction of a new toy, activity or other experience (such as going to the zoo) could contribute new words in the child’s lexicon, but at a certain point the child’s vocabulary may be sufficient for the activities of everyday life.
p. 95
If the drop in vocabulary growth rate is not a statistical artifact, as suggested in the previous section, what else could contribute to the “vocabulary implosion” observed? Before 19 months of age, the child has 444 words in his productive vocabulary. If word learning is partly fueled by “communicative need”, does the decrease in vocabulary growth rate indicate that the child has achieved some level of communicative sufficiency at 18 months? Or does communicative growth transition from learning new words to combining words together in new ways?
p98-100
By 24 months of age, the child had learned 669 words. He learned these words through exposure to them in his environment. But why did he learn these words, and in the order that he learned them? In the next chapter, we consider the relationship between lexical acquisition and the rich linguistic environment of a young child’s first years.
p102
Children’s early language learning is sometimes described as “effortless”, and to adults witnessing the seemingly autonomous birth and growth of language it may indeed appear so. But a better adjective might be “remarkable” when one accounts for the numerous challenges that young learners face in acquiring their first language.
p103
Children’s exposure to language is primarily through speech, and unlike text there are no “spaces” marking word boundaries. As Peters (1983) discusses, although the units of speech are words, children do not necessarily partition the speech stream into their final adult word forms. Even assuming the words and the concepts are available to the child, the mapping between them must be learned.
p103
Elizabeth Spelke and her colleagues argue that children come into the world equipped with systems of core knowledge about objects, agents, number, geometry as well as social knowledge (Spelke, 1994; Spelke and Kinzler, 2007).
Such systems of core knowledge may provide a necessary substrate for early learning, including language acquisition. Children are also sensitive to statistical regularities in the speech they hear, which can help in segmenting words (Saffran et al., 1996). Another skill children bring to bear, of particular relevance to word learning, is the ability to infer the referential intent of others. In the case of learning names for objects, a child must associate the name to what the speaker is referring to, even if that is not the child’s focus of attention when the name is uttered (Baldwin, 1991).
p104
Paul Bloom (2000, p. 90) says, “People cannot learn words unless they are exposed to them”. We can explain much of the character of children’s vocabularies in terms of this banal fact” and as such, characterizing the learning environment is crucial in understanding early word learning.
p104
In the case of word learning, strong evidence for the positive link between the total amount of maternal speech and children’s vocabulary size was provided by Hart and Risley (1995).
p105
Exposure to caregiver speech affects more than just the words that are learned. In recent work, Hurtado et al. (2008) showed that it also positively impacts children’s speech processing efficiency.
Children exposed to more caregiver speech at 18 months knew more words and were faster at word recognition at 24 months. One of the interesting results of this study was the substantial overlap in the effect of maternal speech input on these two outcomes, suggesting that increased processing efficiency supports faster lexical learning, but also that greater lexical knowledge contributed to faster processing efficiency. To use Snow’s analogy, these findings suggest that the developmental “strands” of speech processing skill and lexical knowledge are both entangled and mutually supportive.
p.106
whether a word is salient in particular contexts. It need not be salient in all contexts to have a high recurrence, but if is salient in some situations …
p111
general argument for the role of structured, predictable context as supporting word learning.
p142
Recurrence
But frequency is the weakest predictor in the ensemble of variables we have considered. Instead, in the purely linguistic domain, a word’s recurrence better predicts its age of acquisition.
Recurrence measures how clustered a word is in time; a high recurrence word is one that, when it is used, is used repeatedly over a short duration. For learners with a limited working memory, a word with high recurrence may occur frequently enough in a short duration to take hold in memory.
p163-164
KL-divergence is measuring a word’s scope or “groundedness”, with the idea that more grounded words are more strongly tied to other aspects of experience and are more tightly woven into the child’s understanding.
p165
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Hurtado, N., Marchman, V., and Fernald, A. (2008). Does input in
uence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed and vocabulary size in Spanish-learning children.
Developmental Science, 11(6):F31{F39.
TED video: semantic analysis, influencer, it’s like building a microscope …
The Tennessee Pre-K Debate: Spinach Vs. Easter Grass
September 29, 2015
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/29/444217919/the-tennessee-pre-k-debate-spinach-vs-easter-grass
“It’s like saying spinach is really good for you,” Farran says, “but we can’t afford spinach. But here, I’ve got this Easter grass. Maybe that will be just as good.”
That’s right, Easter grass — that shiny, plastic stuff you layer into an Easter basket.
Metaphor, symbolic play, and logical thought in early childhood.
Genet Soc Gen Psychol Monogr. 1997 Nov;123(4):373-91.
[Discontinued in 2006. Absorbed by The Journal of Social Psychology]
Seitz JA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9431664
Development of the ability to understand diverse types of metaphor was examined in terms of play context (symbolic vs. constructive-object play), Piagetian operational level (preoperational vs. concrete-operational), and medium of presentation (pictures vs. words).
Forty 4-year-olds and 80 6-year-olds (40 preoperational, 40 concrete-operational) were presented with six different types of metaphorical relationships (color, shape, physiognomic, cross-modal, psychological-physical, and taxonomic matches) in both pictures and words in a match-to-sample design.
Results indicated that
(a) constructive-object play, rather than symbolic play, facilitated the understanding of perceptual and taxonomic metaphor, suggesting differences in early styles of metaphoric usage;
(b) despite previous findings, the study failed to replicate a relationship between operativity and metaphoric understanding; and
(c) younger children did significantly better in the pictorial medium, suggesting a picture-superiority effect for more perceptible metaphorical relations (perceptual and physiognomic), whereas older children showed a word-superiority effect for more conceptual metaphors (psychological-physical and taxonomic).
Early Social-Emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship Between Kindergarten Social Competence and Future Wellness
American Journal of Public Health. July 16, 2015
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302630
Damon E. Jones, et al
Objectives. We examined whether kindergarten teachers’ ratings of children’s prosocial skills, an indicator of noncognitive ability at school entry, predict key adolescent and adult outcomes. Our goal was to determine unique associations over and above other important child, family, and contextual characteristics.
Methods. Data came from the Fast Track study of low–socioeconomic status neighborhoods in 3 cities and 1 rural setting. We assessed associations between measured outcomes in kindergarten and outcomes 13 to 19 years later (1991–2000). Models included numerous control variables representing characteristics of the child, family, and context, enabling us to explore the unique contributions among predictors.
Results. We found statistically significant associations between measured social-emotional skills in kindergarten and key young adult outcomes across multiple domains of education, employment, criminal activity, substance use, and mental health.
Conclusions. A kindergarten measure of social-emotional skills may be useful for assessing whether children are at risk for deficits in noncognitive skills later in life and, thus, help identify those in need of early intervention. These results demonstrate the relevance of noncognitive skills in development for personal and public health outcomes.
other versions:
http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2015/07/how-children-s-social-competence-impacts-their-well-being-in-adu.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/16/living/kindergarten-social-skills-adult-success-study-feat
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/want-your-kids-to-go-to-college-and-get-a-job-make-sure-they-learn-how-to-share-in-kindergarten/2015/07/16/4c30726a-2b4e-11e5-a250-42bd812efc09_story.html
Teachers of 753 kindergartners were asked to rate each student’s skill level in eight areas:
● Resolves peer problems on his/her own.
● Is very good at understanding other people’s feelings.
● Shares materials with others.
● Cooperates with peers without prompting.
● Is helpful to others.
● Listens to others’ point of view.
● Can give suggestions and opinions without being bossy
● Acts friendly toward others.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/07/16/kindergarten-social-skill/30199197
Psychology of Popularity
by Dr. Mitch Prinstein
https://www.coursera.org/course/popularity
Huttenlocher et al., 1991
EC relational environments
https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/roi-in-preschool
54:30 the rate of change is so much faster than our rate of problem solving, and we’re always behind the curve. It took to the American Academy of Pediatrics until 3 or 4 years ago to finally make a statement that children under the age of 3 shouldn’t watch TV all the time . TV was introduced in the 50’s. [see also: https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/no-recommendations-on-educational-screen-time] If it took that long …it’s going to take a long time for them to develop a consensus statement on–for example–the use of texting
Questions To Ask About Ed-Tech At Your Kids’ School
March 19, 2015
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/19/393820845/questions-to-ask-about-ed-tech-at-your-kids-school
a national survey in 2014 found that nearly half of all K-12 schools allow students to bring their own smartphones to class, which they’re using to do research, shoot video and, let’s be honest, to text the occasional emoji note.
The science of Santa: new study probes children’s belief
December 18th, 2014
http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2014/12/18/40824/the-science-of-santa-new-study-probes-children-s-b
children quickly begin thinking critically about how realistic Santa mythology is
most children stop believing in Santa altogether around age 8 or 9.
franzcalvo 