00261 Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Reference Article

Zinszer, B. D., Hannon, J., Hu, A., Kouadio, A. É., AKPE, H., Tanoh, F., … Jasińska, K. K. (2020, August 30). Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire. https://doi.org/10.31730/osf.io/q8k5w

Abstract

Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in non-linguistic statistical learning tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed experiments, 157 children in rural communities in the greater-Adzópe region of Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but post-test discrimination between valid and invalid sequences generally did not exceed chance. Individual differences in baseline response speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. These patterns, coupled with a weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language, suggests that the VSL task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as reported in previous samples. These findings echo recent calls for greater internal reliability and cautions against confounding variables in studies of individual differences in statistical learning.