As classrooms worldwide become diverse, the ways teachers engage children in literacy learning must be inclusive to accommodate the multitude of languages spoken. Multimodal literacy practices using digital tools provide innovative opportunities for emergent bilinguals to express their meaning-making processes. This paper details a year-long…

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia is proposed to involve selective procedural memory deficits with intact declarative memory. Recent research in the domain of category learning has demonstrated that adults with dyslexia have selective deficits in Information-Integration (II) category learning that is proposed to rely on procedural learning…

This dissertation investigates the neural bases and development of displacement, which is a language property that allows us to communicate about situations outside the "here-and-now." One way to displace from our immediate environment is to project ourselves into the here-and-now point of an alternative actuality. Another form of…

Children can learn words incidentally from stories. This kind of learning is enhanced when stories are presented both aurally and in written format, compared to just a written presentation. However, we do not know why this bimodal presentation is beneficial. This study explores two possible explanations: whether the bimodal advantage manifests…

Can math concepts be experienced through the sensory modality of balance? Balance Board Math (BBM) is a set of pedagogical math activities designed to instantiate mathematical concepts through stimulation to the vestibular sense: an organ in the inner ear that detects our bodily balance and orientation. BBM establishes the different ways children…

An increasing amount of research emphasises the influence of body movement on the perception of music. This study contributes to the research by investigating whether varied qualities of body movement, when aligned to music may affect the way children attribute meaning to that music. To address this question, 34 children (aged 9-10) were divided…

Gestures--hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas--can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching…

This study explores Multimodal Community Journals (MCJs) as a collaborative visual storytelling, research, and community tool that empowers Black and Latina girls while fostering their engagement with Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). Analyzing the multimodal texts created by the "Dig-A-Girls" and their…

Purpose: Prelingual deaf children with cochlear implants show lower digit span test scores compared to normal-hearing peers, suggesting a working memory impairment. To pinpoint more precisely the subprocesses responsible for this impairment, we designed a sequence reproduction task with varying length (two to six stimuli), modality (auditory or…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

Purpose: The development of vocabulary size in deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) children and adolescents can be delayed compared to their peers due to lack of access to early language input. Complementary vocabulary interventions are reported in the literature. Our aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention methods for their vocabulary…

Across five studies, this dissertation explores the thesis that children are sensitive to information about others' mental states and that this sensitivity scaffolds their learning in both the physical (Chapter 1) and social (Chapters 2 and 3) domain. Chapter 1 explores the interplay between the physical and mental world during visuospatial…

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first present a methodological framework for the analysis of embodied interaction with technology captured through video recording. The framework brings together a social semiotic approach to multimodality with the philosophical and theoretical roots of embodied cognition. We then demonstrate the…

Purpose: The paper shows the interpretive impact of different constructions of the point of view available to the reader/viewer in book and animated movie versions of a children's picture book, a novel for pre-adolescents/early teenagers, and a graphic novel for adolescents and adults. Design/Approach/Methods: Excerpts from book and animated movie…

Using perspectives drawn from recent work in the anthropology of learning as socially situated practice, alongside attention to multimodality as a lens for exploring learning, this article analyzes patterns of meaning-making among children engaged in small group learning during an after-school Creole literacy program in Haiti. Ethnographic…