Archive for August 31, 2021

Our ESRC research project “Investigating the educational potential of touchscreen apps for children’s early vocabulary acquisition” is (sadly) coming to an end. To mark this milestone, we have recorded the final episode of our Child Development Podcast in which Dr Gemma Taylor (who runs our lab) and Dr Joanna Kolak (who has been working as a researcher on the ESRC project) tell you all about our research findings and research in progress!

From this podcast you can learn about the results of the past studies that we have run in the lab, including the development of novel tools for assessing the educational potential of apps, and the comparison of educational potential of the most popular free and paid apps in the app market in the UK.

For the next couple of weeks we will be still collecting data to our final online study on how children learn new words from touchscreen apps. If your child is between 24 and 48 months and you live in the UK, you can still sign up to our study. The study takes around 5 minutes for the 2-year-olds and around 25 minutes for the 3-year-olds. Parents taking part in the study enter a prize draw to win one of the 30 book/photobook vouchers. The study takes place via video chat. Contact us on: CogDevLab@Salford.ac.uk for more details.

Enjoy the podcast!

We’re pleased to let you know that the new episode of our podcast is out! In this episode, Dr Joanna Kolak from our lab talks to Dr Francesca La Morgia – lecturer, researcher, consultant and trainer, the founding director of Mother Tongues, a non for profit organisation that promotes multilingualism in Ireland. Her main interests are language development, multilingualism and intercultural practices in education and in the arts. 

Francesca was telling us about language development of bilingual children – how does it differ from monolingual children’s development and how can parents support their children in acquiring their two (or more) languages in a natural and playful way. Like Francesca said, “because at the end of the day, children learn through play, children learn through engagement with others”. Many great tips and some words of support for parents of bilingual children!