Early Dialogic Reading and Child Brain Development
Dr. Shinmin Wang is a Professor of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). She is currently the Head of Department of Human Development and Family Studies.
Dr. Wang’s research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in language and literacy development in infancy and early childhood. Her recent work has centered on understanding how early experience with dialogic reading can alter child language and cognition development over the toddlerhood and preschool period, and child neural functions related to predictive ability and executive function. She uses observation-based method, behavioral measures and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate these processes.
She is leading the Child Brain Development and Learning Lab at NTNU, and a founding member for the NTNU-Haskins Joint Laboratory of Brain Development and Learning. Her recent collaborators include Prof. Ovid J.-L. Tzeng and Prof. Richard N. Aslin.
Understanding the Unknown Benefits of Early Dialogic Reading: Behavioral and fNIRS Studies
1. Revisiting Dialogic Reading Strategies with 12-Month-Old Infants
Dialogic reading (DR), originally designed for children aged 2 to 5 years, is a specific reading technique that encourages parents to involve the child actively in verbal and nonverbal interactions during shared book reading. By systematically analyzing observational data on how parents read to their infants, Dr. Wang indicate that parents spontaneously applied the gist of DR strategies designed for 2- to 5-year-olds to interact with their 12-month-old infants even though their infants could not respond verbally.
2. Quality of early dialogic reading influences later language and executive function development
In her on-going longitudinal study, Dr. Wang analyzed the quality of dialogic reading when parents read to their 18-month-old infants and found that: (1) the quality of DR at 18 months was predictive of the rate of change in children’s expressive vocabulary and language complexity from 18 to 36 months of age; (2) the quality of DR at 18 months was also prospectively linked to children’s executive function at 4 years. The findings highlight the value of implementing DR during infancy in facilitating language and EF development over toddlerhood and preschool period.
3. Early dialogic reading alters neural functions
Using fNIRS, Dr. Wang identified the predictive brain signal (indexed by oxy-Hb changes to the visual-omission trials) as a robust predictor of 12-month-old infants’ expressive vocabulary, and that their parent-child shared reading experience appears to play a role in the formation of this predictive brain signal.
NTNU Integrates Language Technology into Early Childhood Education, Flipping Learning
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