Studies great and small: convergent approaches to understanding language learning

学习和记住新单词的能力因个体而异。在8岁时，词汇知识丰富的孩子比词汇知识薄弱的孩子多认识3000多个单词，而且这种知识差距随着年龄的增长而不断扩大。这些差异对学业成功有着至关重要的影响：词汇知识与识字发展密切相关，并预测整个学校课程的表现。这项研究旨在了解单词学习中这些差异的预测因素，以及如何最好地支持新单词在长期记忆中的保持。科学研究表明，当我们睡着时，大脑处理一天的记忆，帮助加强长期记忆。我们最近的研究还表明，孩子们对新单词的记忆在一夜的睡眠中得到了改善，而在同等的清醒时间里却没有看到这样的改善。在一周的时间里，他们的记忆力表现出持续的改善，一直大于成年人的记忆力改善，这表明在语言发展的这个阶段，基于睡眠的过程可能特别重要。事实上，在与已知英语单词不太相似的单词上，这种改善最为明显，这表明睡眠在帮助儿童学习他们遇到的大量新信息方面发挥了关键作用。重要的是，我们表明，在学习新单词后不久睡觉对记忆有长期的好处，这种好处在1到2个月后仍然很明显，而且现有词汇知识较弱的孩子在临近就寝时间学习新单词时尤其受益。这些发现对于支持有困难的学习者具有重要的实际意义，特别是考虑到人们的普遍观点是，重要的话题应该在早上孩子最不累的时候教授。然而，睡眠研究是资源密集型的，通常会在不寻常的环境中研究一小群人--比如在睡眠实验室度过一晚，或者晚上有人在家拜访研究人员。在将这些发现应用于实践之前，我们需要首先将证据扩展到实验室之外：睡眠和这些相关因素是否同样支持日常词汇发展？拟议的奖学金旨在通过两种方式在研究和实践之间架起桥梁：第一，通过改善当前研究成果在学术界内外的可及性，第二，通过在一个流行的应用程序的数据中测试语言学习理论。在实践中，这包括四个主要目标：1)确保当前研究成果的高质量科学出版物，以及可广泛分享给教育从业者和公众的可访问摘要。2)以增强研究过程的透明度和公开性的方式发展我的研究实践，确保高质量的未来研究可以被其他人广泛获取。3)提高我分析来自真实世界学习环境(例如，在线平台、应用程序)的“大数据”的数据技能。4)评估睡眠是否同样有助于在真实世界学习环境中记忆新单词，为未来更好地理解新学单词的长期记忆奠定基础。拟议的奖学金活动将支持更广泛地传播最近关于睡眠对新单词长期记忆的好处的研究，以及利用这些好处来支持词汇量较弱的儿童的潜力。重要的是，该奖学金将为未来研究这些发现是否适用于从语言学习应用程序进行日常学习奠定基础，弥合词汇研究与实践之间的重要差距。

The ability to learn and remember new words is remarkably variable across individuals. By just 8 years old, a child with good vocabulary knowledge can know over 3000 more words than a child with weaker vocabulary knowledge, and this knowledge gap continues to grow with age. These differences have crucial implications for academic success: vocabulary knowledge is tightly related to literacy development, and predicts performance across the school curriculum. This research aims to understand predictors of these differences in word learning, and how to best support retention of new words in long-term memory.Scientific studies show that the brain processes the day's memories while we are asleep, helping to strengthen them in long-term memory. Our recent research also showed that children's memory for new words improved over a night's sleep, whereas no such improvements were seen during equivalent time spent awake. Their memory showed continued improvements across the course of a week that were consistently larger than adults' memory improvements, indicating that sleep-based processes may be particularly important during this stage of language development. Indeed, the improvements were most noticeable for words less similar to known English words, suggesting that sleep plays a key role in helping children to learn the vast amounts of new information that they encounter. Importantly, we showed that sleeping soon after learning the new words had long-term benefits for memory that were still apparent 1-to-2 months later, and that children with weaker existing vocabulary knowledge especially benefited from learning new words close to bedtime. These findings have important practical implications for supporting struggling learners, particularly given the common view that important topics should be taught in the morning when children are least tired.However, sleep studies are resource-intensive, and often study small groups of people in unusual settings - such as spending a night in a sleep lab, or having a researcher visit at home in the evening. Before applying these findings to practice, we need to first extend the evidence beyond the lab: do sleep and these associated factors similarly support day-to-day vocabulary development? The proposed fellowship seeks to build bridges between research and practice in two ways: first by improving the accessibility of current research findings within and beyond academia, and second by testing theories of language learning in data sourced from a popular app. In practice, this includes four primary goals to:1) Ensure high-quality scientific publications from the present research findings, and accessible summaries that can be shared widely with educational practitioners and the general public.2) Develop my research practices in ways that enhance transparency and openness of the research process, ensuring high-quality future research that can be widely accessed by others.3) Advance my data skills for analysing "big data" sourced from real-world learning settings (e.g., online platforms, apps).4) Assess whether sleep similarly benefits memory for new words in real-world learning settings, establishing foundations for future research into better understanding long-term retention of newly learned words.The proposed fellowship activities will support the broader communication of recent research into the benefits of sleep for long-term memory of new words, and the potential for capitalising upon these benefits to support children who have weaker vocabulary. Importantly, the fellowship will establish foundations for future research into the applicability of these findings for day-to-day learning from a language-learning app, bridging an important gap between vocabulary research and practice.