Kaja K Jasinska

University of Delaware | UDel UD · Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science

As the field of educational neuroscience continues to grow, questions have emerged regarding the ecological validity and applicability of this research to educational practice. Recent advances in mobile neuroimaging technologies have made it possible to conduct neuroscientific studies directly in naturalistic learning environments. We propose that...

School closures due to teacher strikes or political unrest in low-resource contexts can adversely affect children’s educational outcomes and career opportunities. Phone-based educational technologies could help bridge these gaps in formal schooling, but it is unclear whether or how children and their families will use such systems during periods of...

Understanding how pre-literate children's language abilities and neural function relate to future reading ability is important for identifying children who may be at-risk for reading problems. Pre-literate children are already proficient users of spoken language and their developing brain networks for language become highly overlapping with brain n...

Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in statistical learning...

The BDNF gene is a prominent promoter of neuronal development, maturation and plasticity. Its Val66Met polymorphism affects brain morphology and function within several areas and is associated with several cognitive functions and neurodevelopmental disorder susceptibility. Recently, it has been associated with reading, reading-related traits and al...

The BDNF gene is a prominent promoter of neuronal development, maturation and plasticity. Its Val⁶⁶Met polymorphism affects brain morphology and function within several areas and is associated with several cognitive functions and neurodevelopmental disorder susceptibility. Recently, it has been associated with reading, reading-related traits and al...

Dans les zones rurales de Côte d'Ivoire, les communautés pauvres, dépendant des productions agricoles de rente sont confrontées à l'épineux problème de l'éducation de leurs enfants dans une langue autre que la langue maternelle. Cette étude s'appuie sur la justification théorique de l'opportunité d'une éducation préalable en langue locale. En outre...

Low levels of childhood literacy in global contexts may be mitigated by educational technologies, however, these technologies often rely on parents of sufficient literacy to effectively support their children. Given low levels of adult literacy in many low-resource contexts, we investigate the nature of low-literate adult support for children's use...

Significant research has demonstrated the crucial role that parents play in supporting the development of children's literacy, but in contexts where adults may lack sufficient literacy in the target language, it is not clear how to most effectively scaffold parental support for children's literacy. Prior work has designed technologies to teach chil...

Literacy is a powerful tool against poverty, leading to further education and vocational success. In sub‐Saharan Africa, school‐children commonly learn in two languages—African and European. Multiple early literacy skills (including phonological awareness and receptive language) support literacy acquisition, but this has yet to be empirically teste...

A substantial amount of variation in reading comprehension skill is explained by listening comprehension skill, suggesting tight links between printed and spoken discourse processing. In addition, both word level (e.g., vocabulary) and discourse-level sub-skills (e.g., inference-making) support overall comprehension. However, while these contributi...

Epidemiological population studies highlight the presence of substantial individual variability in reading skill, with approximately 5-10% of individuals characterized as having specific reading disability (SRD). Despite reported substantial heritability, typical for a complex trait, the specifics of the connections between reading and the genome a...

Portable neuroimaging approaches provide new advances to the study of brain function and brain development with previously inaccessible populations and in remote locations. This paper shows the development of field functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging to the study of child language, reading, and cognitive development in a rural vil...

The brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val⁶⁶Met single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) has been associated with individual differences in brain structure and function, and cognition. Research on BDNF's influence on brain and cognition has largely been limited to adults, and little is known about the association of this gene, and specifically th...

Bilingual children's reading as a function of age of first bilingual language exposure (AoE) was examined. Bilingual (varied AoE) and monolingual children (N = 421) were compared in their English language and reading abilities (6–10 years) using phonological awareness, semantic knowledge, and reading tasks. Structural equation modeling was applied...

How does bilingual exposure impact children’s neural circuitry for learning to read? Theories of bilingualism suggests that exposure to two languages may yield a functional and neuroanatomical adaptation to support the learning of two languages (Klein et al., 2014). To test the hypothesis that this neural adaptation may vary as a function of struct...

Understanding how genes impact the brain's functional activation for learning and cognition during development remains limited. We asked whether a common genetic variant in the BDNF gene (the Val66Met polymorphism) modulates neural activation in the young brain during a critical period for the emergence and maturation of the neural circuitry for re...

List of behavioral assessments. Each behavioral measure from the corresponding assessment battery is listed. Mean and by-age reliability coefficients for each measure are included. (TIFF)

Analysis script in AFNI (Analysis of Functional Neuroimages software package) used to analyze data. (SH)

Skilled, fluent reading involves mastery of multiple linguistic (e.g., phonological, semantic, morphological, syntactic) and related cognitive processes (e.g., processing speed, attention, working memory). Development of these processes is highly predictive of fluent reading. Among these, impairments in phonological processes such as phonological a...

What neural changes underlie reading development in monolingual and bilingual children? We examined neural activation patterns of younger (ages 6-8) and older (ages 8-10) children and adults to see whether early-life language experience influences the development of neural systems for reading. Using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy, we observe...

How does a bilingual child’s two languages impact the brain’s neural circuitry for reading? Can we observe a “neural signature” (Kovelman, Baker, & Petitto, 2008) in the brains of bilingual children as they read, especially when each language in the bilingual pair has a different relationship between its sound patterning and the printed text? We te...

Is the developing bilingual brain fundamentally similar to the monolingual brain (e.g., neural resources supporting language and cognition)? Or, does early-life bilingual language experience change the brain? If so, how does age of first bilingual exposure impact neural activation for language? We compared how typically-developing bilingual and mon...

Does early exposure to a visual signed language "hurt" auditory language tissue development: Evidence from fNIRS neuroimaging of language processing in deaf individuals with cochlear implants! ABSTRACT! Controversy abounds regarding the specific impact of differences in language experience on the acquisition of spoken language in deaf individuals w...