Abstract
Speaking Multiple Languages Can Influence Emotional Development
When parents discuss emotion, they help their children to accurately label and understand their own emotions. This explicit instruction further helps children to better regulate their emotions, the researchers noted. Shifting from one language to another may help children to regulate their emotional response by using a less-emotional, nonnative language as a way to decrease negative arousal, or to help model culture-specific emotional regulation, it said. Research suggests that a child’s emotional competence is fundamentally shaped by a multilingual environment; when bilingual individuals switch languages, the way they experience emotions changes as well. Shifting from one language to another may help children to regulate their emotional response by using a less-emotional, nonnative language as a way to decrease negative arousal, or to help model culture-specific emotional regulation. In addition, research suggests that when bilingual individuals switch languages, the way they experience emotions changes as well. Bilingual parents may use a specific language to express an emotional concept because they feel that language provides a better cultural context for expressing the emotion. For example, a native Finnish speaker may be more likely to use English to tell her children that she loves them because it is uncommon to explicitly express emotions in Finnish. Thus, the language that a parent chooses to express a particular concept can help to provide cues that reveal his or her emotional state.—Chen, S. H., Kennedy, M., & Zhou, Q. (2012). Parents’ expression and discussion of emotion in the multilingual family: Does language matter? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 365–383.
Long-Term Consequences of Meningitis
Nearly half the children who survive meningitis will be left with long-term conditions. One in three youngsters who are treated for the disease will suffer after effects, including mental health problems, epilepsy, and learning difficulties, the study found. One in five children will have anxiety or behavioral disorders, while young survivors are five times more likely to have speech and communication problems. The disease also affects long- and short-term memory, with some children left with a borderline low IQ. Children who had meningitis were five times more likely to have a significant hearing impairment, with 2.4% of survivors having bilateral hearing loss that required a cochlear implant.—Chandran, A., Herbert, H., Misurski, D., & Santosham, M. (2011). Long-term sequelae of childhood bacterial meningitis: An underappreciated problem. Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, 30, 3–6.
Texting Hurts Grammar
Middle school students who frequently use “tech-speak”—omitting letters to shorten words and using homophone symbols, such as “@” for “at” or “2nite” for “tonight”—performed worse on a test of basic grammar. Researchers surveyed 228 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders on their daily habits, including the number of texts they sent and received, their attitudes about texting, and their other activities during the day, such as watching television or reading for pleasure. The researchers then assessed the students using 22 questions adapted from a ninth-grade grammar test to include only topics taught by sixth grade, including verb/noun agreement, use of correct tense, homophones, possessives, apostrophes, comma usage, punctuation, and capitalization. They found that the more often students sent text messages using tech-speak (shortened words and homophones), the worse their grammar. Moreover, the more often a student received text messages using tech-speak, the more likely he or she was to send messages using that language. There was no gender difference after accounting for the amount of texting each student did, although teenage girls have been found in other studies to send and receive nearly twice as many messages per month as boys do: 4,050 texts on average, compared with 2,539. Students who use tech-speak are not code-switching offline. In that way, students who use tech-speak differ from those who speak multiple languages; multilingual children have been found to switch back and forth easily among their languages in different contexts and may actually be more flexible in other ways of thinking. Tech-speak is similar enough to standard English that researchers believe it may bleed over into different contexts more easily. It is not seen as a different language, so the more students get used to communicating English language this way, the more they generalize what they do in texting to the grammatical rules of writing. Teachers can help them shore up their grammar skills by making them more aware of their grammar usage and by assigning writing tasks that differ significantly from their typical texting topics. So, for example, writing an essay debating a current issue or writing a letter to the president might be more likely to trigger students to switch into using more formal language, and thus cement their grammar skills. As students become more adept in grammar, they can be encouraged to think about their grammar choices in texting more consciously.—Cingel, D. P., & Sundar, S. S. (2012). Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills. New Media & Society. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/1461444812442927
Memory Training Unlikely to Help
Working memory training is unlikely to be an effective treatment for children suffering from disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity or dyslexia. In addition, memory training tasks appear to have limited effect on healthy adults and children looking to do better in school or improve their cognitive skills. The success of working memory training programs is often based on the idea that you can train your brain to perform better, using repetitive memory trials, much like lifting weights builds muscle mass. However, research shows that simply loading up the brain with training exercises will not lead to better performance outside of the tasks presented within these tests.
Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 23 peer-reviewed studies. The studies were randomized controlled trials or experiments, had some sort of working memory treatment and a control group. The studies comprised a wide range of participants, including young children, children with cognitive impairments, such as ADHD, and healthy adults. Overall, working memory training improved performance on tasks related to the training itself but did not have an impact on more general cognitive performance such as verbal skills, attention, reading or arithmetic. In recent years, several commercial, computer-based working memory training programs have been developed and purport to benefit students suffering from ADHD, dyslexia, language disorders, poor academic performance, or other issues. Some even claim to boost people’s IQs. These programs are widely used around the world in schools and clinics, and most involve tasks in which participants are given many memory tests that are designed to be challenging, the study said. In the light of such evidence, it seems very difficult to justify the use of working memory training programs in relation to the treatment of reading and language disorders. The findings cast strong doubt on claims that working memory training is effective in improving cognitive ability and scholastic attainment. —Melby-Lervåg, M., & Hulme, C. (2012, May 21). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0028228
Cortical Maturation in ADHD
Compared with typically developing children, cortical surface area development is delayed in those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a study published in the Aug. 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry.
Noting that ADHD is characterized by delayed maturation of prefrontal cortical thickness, researchers conducted a study involving 234 children with ADHD and 231 typically developing children to examine whether this delay extends to the maturation of cortical surface area and gyrification. Each child was scanned using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques four times between the ages of 10 and 17. The trajectory of cortical surface area development and gyrification was defined as well as the sequence of cortical maturation. The researchers found that children with ADHD experienced delay in the cortical surface area developmental trajectory. The median age at which 50 percent of cortical vertices attained peak area in the right prefrontal cortex was reached significantly later in the ADHD group (14.6 years) versus the typically developing group (12.7 years). There was a delay in the maturation of cortical surface area in ADHD that mirrors the delayed maturation of cortical thickness previously reported.—Shaw, P., Malek, M., Watson, B., Sharp, W., Evans, A., & Greenstein, D. (2012). Development of cortical surface area and gyrification in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 72, 191-197.