BOLD Lab @UofT

Our new study shows how educational disruption shapes reading comprehension
📖 When formal literacy instruction is interrupted, kids rely more on language comprehension than decoding.
🧠 Neuroimaging reveals compensatory pathways supporting reading comprehension
Check out the preprint: osf.io/m9e3c_v1

Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Language and Literacy in Côte d'Ivoire Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Most children in the Majority World learn to read in a 2nd language, often late.
🇨🇮 Our study in Côte d’Ivoire shows L1 phonological awareness boosts L2 reading—even when children never learn to read in the L1
Implications for global literacy efforts & SDG 4.6.
Check out the preprint: 📘 osf.io/5av3y

Caregiver stress is linked with internalizing problems in adolescents. BOLD lab students Andrea De Bartolo and Julianna Corbett presenting work from Côte d’Ivoire at the Let’s Talk About Youth conference.

Predictors of harsh discipline practices among rural households in Côte d'Ivoire Harsh discipline is associated with adverse child outcomes across diverse contexts, but research is limited in sub–Saharan Africa. We assess the preva…

📚 New research from rural Côte d’Ivoire:
🔴 Higher maternal stress, anxiety, and food insecurity predict harsh discipline.
🟢 Parents' educational aspirations for children are protective.
🔍 A call for reducing poverty & consequent poor mental health + stress.
🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How does war & displacement shape young minds? 🧠 Our new #fNIRS study on Syrian refugee children resettled in Canada shows that early & prolonged displacement changes brain network organization, potentially affecting long-term cognitive development #Refugees www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint: the developmental timing of displacement in refugee children relates to neural network organization. Varied age and duration of displacement were used to examine the timing of adversity. Early and prolonged displacement is linked with reduced small worldness. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Communities of practice can improve teachers’ professional development. But, infrastructural challenges pose difficulties for in-person connections in rural communities. Check out Vikram Cannanure's work on how social media & chatbots can create virtual communities: dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

"I believe I did not preach into the desert": Opportunities & Challenges in Scaling Teacher Mentorship through Mobile Technology in Rural Côte d'Ivoire | Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on ...

Mentoring is crucial for teachers' professional development but challenges of access, resources & capacity make it difficult in low-infrastructure contexts. Mobile technologies can scale teacher professional development. Check out Vikram Cannanure's work: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Socioeconomic risk influences cognitive development & learning. Socioeconomic disadvantages and kinship fostering (child in care of extended family while parents pursue economic opportunities) linked with poorer EF and literacy in rural Côte d'Ivoire. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Impact of ASL Exposure on Spoken Phonemic Discrimination in Adult CI Users: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study Abstract. We examined the impact of exposure to a signed language (American Sign Language, or ASL) at different ages on the neural systems that support spoken language phonemic discrimination in deaf ...

#fNIRS study of language processing in deaf adults using a cochlear implant: early ASL exposure doesn't disrupt spoken language, but may offset negative effects of language deprivation that deaf children without sign language exposure experience pre-CI. direct.mit.edu/nol/article/...

Accelerating progress towards eradicating child labour (SDG8.7) with quality education (SDG4): School quality is linked to reduced child cocoa labour in Côte d’Ivoire - Brooke Wortsman, Jasodhara Bhat... Child labour disrupts education, but there is scant research on the reciprocal relationship: education disrupting child labour. We examined the link between sch...

School quality is linked to reduced child cocoa labor in Côte d’Ivoire. Investments in quality education #SDG4 may serve the dual purpose of reducing child labor #SDG8_7 alongside improving children’s learning outcomes journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

BOLD lab study led by Dr. Shakhlo Nematova shows that phonological similarity between two languages may explain the previously reported bilingual effect in audiovisual speech perception sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Statistical learning and children's emergent literacy in rural Côte d'Ivoire 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 edu...

Stat learning and reading in Côte d’Ivoire: a very challenging study with many careful experimental iterations to develop a culturally appropriate paradigm. Hats off to Ben Zinszer for realizing this impressive program. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Prioritizing research–policy–community partnerships, promoting complementary research approaches, considering measurement timescales, and capacity exchange approaches are key to large-scale impact evaluations and RCTs in Majority World contexts. Check out our paper: doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

<em>Language Learning</em> | Language Learning Research Club Journal | Wiley Online Library A one-page Accessible Summary of this article in non-technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis-database.org

BOLD lab study on statistical learning and emergent literacy in primary school children in Côte d'Ivoire led by Dr. Ben Zinszer highlighting the importance of testing theories in understudied contexts onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Effective bilingual education in Francophone West Africa: constraints and possibilities Bilingual education that incorporates a local language alongside the official language has become an increasingly common approach in sub-Saharan Africa for improving literacy rates and learning out...

Bilingual education is often linked to (but doesn't guarantee) better learning. BOLD lab study led by Mary Ball identifies implementation & sociocultural factors critical to high-quality effective bilingual programs in Francophone West Africa. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Cash Transfers Improve Economic Conditions and Reduce Maternal Stress in Rural Côte d’Ivoire - Journal of Child and Family Studies We report midline impacts of a community-randomized cash transfer intervention to 1857 vulnerable mothers in 140 rural cocoa-farming communities of Côte d’Ivoire. Compared to mothers in the comparison...

Cash transfers to economically vulnerable moms improve mental health, reduce stress, and improve household economic conditions. Check out our paper. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Neural Activation during Phonological Processing in Primary‐School Children with Limited Reading Experience: Insights from Rural Côte d'Ivoire We examined neural activation underlying phonological processing (an important predictor and outcome of reading) in children without consistent reading experience as a result of limited access to qua....

In rural Côte d’Ivoire, kids of varying ages learn in the same classroom. Younger vs older readers show different neural activity for phonological processing—neural language & reading networks may depend on the developmental timing of reading instruction. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In Côte d’Ivoire, parental involvement is positively (but parental expectations are negatively) related to children's socioemotional skills. SE skills mediate the link between parent factors and learning outcomes. Led by BOLD's Medha Aurora. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Paper from BOLD's Brooke Wortsman. In Côte d’Ivoire, children who enroll in school late, poor readers📖, & cocoa laborers🍫 are more likely to dropout of primary school. But, quality education is protective against dropout for high risk children. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Individual Differences in Leveraging Regularity in Emergent L2 Readers in Rural Côte d’Ivoire Statistical learning (SL) approaches to reading maintain that proficient reading requires assimilation of the rich statistical regularities in the writing system. Reading skills in developing first...

Good readers are sensitive to statistical regularities between print and sound. Not in low-literacy contexts: good readers leverage semantic regularities to read instead. Implications for statistical learning theories of reading? Check out our paper: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Check us out at #SRCD23 https://t.co/lLwSGxX41U

New publication on bilingual children’s language skills in four Ivorian languages and French. Our Ivorian language assessment toolkit is available for anyone interested. https://t.co/cpfKf2yZQo

Check out our latest work on quality education and children’s work on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire https://t.co/yApZedWFzY

🚨Postdoc position in education and developmental cognitive neuroscience🚨 Join our research team at @APHDatOISE at the University of Toronto. Come work on exciting #fNIRS #neuroimaging studies of child development and learning in Côte d'Ivoire https://t.co/ahjs3kW9fo https://t.co/ncZY01knGH

BOLD Lab is on the move! 🚛🇨🇦🏠Our new home is the University of Toronto! https://t.co/7YYSaNAhmq

We are so glad that we got the opportunity to host Bradley White from @GallaudetU for his presentation on "Listening Effort and Neurocognitive plasticity in Hearing Aid and Cochlear Implant Users". We had a blast and learned a lot! @BL2Neuro @VL2Science https://t.co/jnqz1dNRtH