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 tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed tasks, 157 children in rural communities surrounding the Adzópe region in Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but in a post-test, their discrimination between valid and invalid sequences did not exceed chance. Overall, their responses were slower than U.S. children completing a similar task (Qi et al., 2019), and these individual differences in processing speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. Moreover, the weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language further suggests that this task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as in previous samples. We recommend adaptations to the statistical learning paradigm that may improve its generalizability across the wider global population.

Socio-economic status (SES) is closely linked to children’s reading development. Previous research suggests that executive functions (EF) mediate the effects of SES on reading, however, this research has almost exclusively focused on high-income countries (HICs). Comparatively less is known about the mechanisms that link SES and literacy in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). Childhood experiences of poverty in LMICs have been consistently linked to cognitive development through two sets of predictors: nutrition and physical growth, and the availability of educational scaffolding at home.The influence of the home learning environment (i.e. material deprivation, types of caregiver interactions) and nutrition to support children’s physical development (i.e. children’s BMI and stature for their age) on EF and literacy was examined in 630 primary-school children (6-14 years) in rural Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Structural equation modeling revealed that SES had an indirect effect on EF via the home learning environment, and in turn, reading. Importantly, the home learning environment, and a child’s physical development and nutrition showed distinct contributions to EF. The results suggest that improved educational scaffolding at home and supplemented nutrition could support EF development and reduce the negative impact of socioeconomic risk factors on reading.

Statistical learning (SL) is a learning mechanism that does not directly depend on knowledge of a language, but predicts language and literacy outcomes for children and adults. Research linking SL and literacy has not addressed children who first learn to read in their second language (L2), common in primary schools worldwide. Several studies have linked SL with childhood literacy in Australia, China, Europe, and the U.S., and we pre-registered an adaptation for Côte d’Ivoire, where students are educated in French and speak a local language at home. Recruiting 117 sixth- graders from primary schools in several villages, we tested for correlations >0.3 between SL and literacy with 80-90% power. We found no evidence for these correlations, but visual SL was correlated with L2 phonological awareness. Although this finding may suggest a role of SL in emergent L2 skills, it underscores the need to include L2 acquisition contexts in literacy research.