Studies great and small: convergent approaches to understanding language learning

学习和记忆新单词的能力在个体之间存在显著差异。到8岁时，一个拥有良好词汇知识的孩子可以比一个词汇知识较弱的孩子多认识3000多个单词，而且这种知识差距会随着年龄的增长而继续扩大。这些差异对学业成功有着至关重要的影响：词汇知识与识字能力的发展密切相关，并预测了整个学校课程的表现。这项研究的目的是了解词汇学习差异的预测因素，以及如何最好地支持长期记忆中的新词保留。科学研究表明，大脑在我们睡觉时处理一天的记忆，有助于加强长期记忆。我们最近的研究还表明，孩子们对新单词的记忆在一夜睡眠中得到了改善，而在同等时间的清醒中没有看到这种改善。他们的记忆力在一周内持续改善，一直大于成年人的记忆力改善，这表明睡眠过程在语言发展的这个阶段可能特别重要。事实上，对于与已知英语单词不太相似的单词，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着关键作用。重要的是，我们发现，在学习新单词后不久睡觉对记忆有长期的好处，在1到2个月后仍然很明显，并且现有词汇知识较弱的儿童特别受益于在睡前学习新单词。这些发现对于支持学习困难的学生具有重要的实际意义，特别是考虑到人们普遍认为重要的主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，并且经常在不寻常的环境中研究小群体的人-例如在睡眠实验室度过一晚，或者让研究人员晚上回家。在将这些发现应用于实践之前，我们首先需要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建立桥梁：首先是通过提高学术界内外当前研究成果的可访问性，其次是通过来自流行应用程序的数据测试语言学习理论。在实践中，这包括四个主要目标：1）确保现有研究成果的高质量科学出版物，和可访问的摘要，可以与教育工作者和公众广泛分享。以提高研究过程的透明度和开放性的方式发展我的研究实践，确保其他人可以广泛访问的高质量未来研究。3）提高我分析来自现实世界学习环境的“大数据”的数据技能（例如，在线平台、应用程序）。4）评估睡眠是否同样有利于在现实世界的学习环境中记忆新单词，为未来更好地理解新学习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长期记忆新单词的好处的研究，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在语言学习应用程序的日常学习中的适用性奠定基础，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.