Gibberish by Young Vo (review) Bush, Elizabeth
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books,
02/2022, Letnik:
75, Številka:
6
Journal Article, Book Review
How do our environments affect our minds? Bower, Isabella S.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2023, Letnik:
382, Številka:
6671
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Neuroscience reveals how building design shapes our behavioral, brain, and body responses
I approach my research in an interdisciplinary manner because that is how my mind works. When I was growing ...up, I looked for patterns in my environment to help me make sense of my surroundings. When I was 2 years old, my parents took me on a car trip through Tasmania, an island state southeast of mainland Australia. I had not started speaking; yet, out of nowhere, I began singing “E-I-E-I-O” from the nursery rhyme Old MacDonald Had a Farm. This refrain turned into a reoccurring performance at random intervals, which caused my parents some confusion. Then they detected a pattern. The melody chimed from the backseat each time that we passed signage for a McDonald’s restaurant. Often, the melody alerted them before they had noticed the sign along the road. A few years later, my kindergarten teachers reported that I would spend hours creating my own environments with wooden building blocks. Unlike other children, who would flit between activities, I fixated on incrementally building my own world and filtered out all other distractions around me.
Rhymes are popular tools in children’s learning in many cultures, but the pedagogical underpinnings of rhyme practice are largely unknown. Drawing on insights from a study in China, this paper ...explores the pedagogical meaning and function of rhymes in early childhood education. Individual interviews were conducted with 10 Chinese early childhood teachers and a series of classroom observations of teachers’ rhyme practices were undertaken. An overarching theme from the data was the multifunctionality of rhymes, or in teachers’ words ‘they can do many things’. Framed by the notion of tools in sociocultural theory and existing studies on rhymes as a pedagogical tool, this theme is discussed with reference to the discourses on mediation, habitual practice, and professional support which bring to the fore some issues in Chinese early childhood education.
When infants and adults communicate, they exchange social signals of availability and communicative intention such as eye gaze. Previous research indicates that when communication is successful, ...close temporal dependencies arise between adult speakers’ and listeners’ neural activity. However, it is not known whether similar neural contingencies exist within adult–infant dyads. Here, we used dual-electroencephalography to assess whether direct gaze increases neural coupling between adults and infants during screen-based and live interactions. In experiment 1 (n = 17), infants viewed videos of an adult who was singing nursery rhymes with (i) direct gaze (looking forward), (ii) indirect gaze (head and eyes averted by 20°), or (iii) direct-oblique gaze (head averted but eyes orientated forward). In experiment 2 (n = 19), infants viewed the same adult in a live context, singing with direct or indirect gaze. Gaze-related changes in adult–infant neural network connectivity were measured using partial directed coherence. Across both experiments, the adult had a significant (Granger) causal influence on infants’ neural activity, which was stronger during direct and direct-oblique gaze relative to indirect gaze. During live interactions, infants also influenced the adult more during direct than indirect gaze. Further, infants vocalized more frequently during live direct gaze, and individual infants who vocalized longer also elicited stronger synchronization from the adult. These results demonstrate that direct gaze strengthens bidirectional adult–infant neural connectivity during communication. Thus, ostensive social signals could act to bring brains into mutual temporal alignment, creating a joint-networked state that is structured to facilitate information transfer during early communication and learning.
Since late 2017, journalists, advocacy groups, and policy-makers have expressed serious concerns about popular genres of video content on YouTube that target child viewers but which are not ...child-appropriate according to extant definitions and cultural expectations. This article combines a discourse and thematic analysis of 54 news articles and opinion pieces about ‘disturbing’ children’s genres on YouTube with textual analysis of the two genres at the centre of this reportage. The analysis illuminates why the formal, aesthetic, and thematic qualities of these particular child-oriented YouTube genres trouble existing cultural expectations around children’s media. I argue that the genres addressed in the reportage share a key quality that I refer to as the ‘algorithmic uncanny’: common semantic and syntactic features that foster among reporters a perception that algorithms have played a key role in not only distributing the content but in shaping its aesthetic and thematic agendas.
During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French‐learning ...9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognize own‐race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German‐French speaker reciting a nursery rhyme in French (native condition) or in German (non‐native condition). In the test phase, infants’ face recognition was tested by presenting a picture of the speaker's face they were familiarized with, side by side with a novel face. At 9 and 12 months, neither infants in the native condition nor the ones in the non‐native condition clearly recognized the speaker's face. In Experiment 2, we familiarized infants with the still picture of the speaker's face, along with the auditory speech stream. This time, both 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognized the face of the speaker they had been familiarized with, but only if she spoke in their native language. This study shows that at least from 9 months of age, language modulates the way faces are recognized.
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