The Institute of Eminence (IoE) project of the University of Hyderabad on ‘Long-term literacy training and its impact on cognitive functioning’ was inaugurated at the Government Primary School, Serilingampally.
The project sanctioned to Ramesh Kumar Mishra, Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences (CNCS), School of Medical Sciences, through the IoE scheme aims to administer long-term literacy training in Kannada and Telugu to illiterate participants and investigate its impact on cognitive functioning.
This ambitious and challenging project involves an intensive training programme on a large number of participants and a wide array of tasks for measuring cognitive functioning.
Prof. Mishra said the current project extends experimental approaches to bilingual illiterates from low socio-economic strata in India for the first time. A key novelty of the project is to examine if literacy training in two languages is more beneficial than training in one language. He acknowledged efforts of school headmaster Narasimhan in recruiting participants for the study.
The research team, which will carry out the testing and training for over eight months, will be headed by Vaishnavi Mohite, a 3rd year PhD student at CNCS.
Prof Mishra with his collaborator Falk Huettig from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, has already published a significant body of work in high impact journals such as Science Advances on the role of literacy on cognition.
