Recommendation of: Reading and Vocabulary Knowledge in English-Meetei Mayek Biliterates. Round#3

The positive relation between word reading and children's vocabulary development has been extensively documented.That said, like most research in psychology and the behavioral sciences, the available evidence comes predominantly from majority populations.In the context of language learning, that means monolingual speakers or multilingual speakers where there is close alignment between home and school language learning.But what does the relation between word learning and vocabulary knowledge look like when the learning contexts are discordant?In the current study, Pamei et al. (2025) examined this question by investigating word learning and vocabulary development in two languages, English and Meetei Mayek, among a sample of 381 Grade 3 (approximate age 10), students in Manipur, India.In this context, formal literacy education begins in English rather than in students' regional home language of Meetei Mayek.This fact provides an innovative context in which to understand a) whether the relation between word reading and vocabulary looks different in the two languages, and b) whether there is linguistic interdependence between learning in the two languages.The results of the study provided mixed support for each of their primary hypotheses.The authors found that the some of the correlations between reading and vocabulary were stronger for English than for Meetei Mayek, depending on the specific measures and analytic strategies used.Additionally, the findings indicated support for linguistic interdependence for word reading, with English word reading associated with Meetei Mayek word reading, but not for linguistic interdependence for vocabulary.This study provides a strong contribution to the literature by examining an underrepresented language that goes beyond the dominant contexts from which our knowledge of language learning has been generated, and thus has the potential to contribute to new lines of empirical and theoretical work that is inclusive of global variations.The Stage 2 manuscript was evaluated over three rounds of in-depth peer review, the first consisting of substantial comments from two scholars with relevant expertise, and the second and third consisting of a close review by