TalkTogether Blog

Contributing author:  Kathleen Kupiec This article was written as part of the TalkTogether’s academic blog writing programme for early career researchers. Based on: Nag, S., John, S., & Agrawal, A. (2024). NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child directed print in understudied languages. Behavior Research Methods. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02339-x   The Problem: Current Guidance and Tools are Limited to Certain Languages Children’s language acquisition and development is immensely important, with far-reaching and wide-ranging benefits that include supporting their social skills, emotional life, academic success, and literacy development [1]. Considered a foundational skill, literacy is the bedrock for an individual’s future, with positive impacts on their educational achievement and quality of life. Unfortunately, without taking additional measures, “an estimated 300 million children and young people will still lack basic nume...

Contributing author: Siyu Ma This article was written as part of the TalkTogether’s academic blog writing programme for early career researchers. Based on: Nag, S., Vagh, S. B., Dulay, K. M., Snowling, M., Donolato, E., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2024). Home learning environments and children’s language and literacy skills: A meta-analytic review of studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries. Psychological Bulletin, 150(2), 132-153. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000417   Income inequality (i.e., the distribution of wealth across a country) is increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, both in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries as well as high-income economies. It appears that growing up in countries with large income inequality has a negative impact on children’s health, school performance, and wellbeing [1, 2]. However, for children in LMI countries with large income inequality, the consequence could be worse developmental outcomes. This is because children from poor...