About

Joan Jian-Jian Ren is a professor in the Department of Mathematics, specializing in the Statistics Program. His research interests include statistical models and inferences, survival analysis, applications in biomedical research, longitudinal data analysis, and likelihood methods. He is based at the College Park campus, with contact details including a phone number and a personal webpage at https://math.umd.edu/~jjren/. His work focuses on developing and applying statistical methodologies to address complex problems in biomedical research and related fields.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Statistical learning as a buffer: Investigating its impact on the link between home environment and reading achievement

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2025-02-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  • Chinese radical positional SL moderates the direct and indirect effect of SES on reading. • Chinese phonetic SL moderates the direct effect of SES on reading. • Vocabulary knowledge and MA mediate the effects of family SES on reading. • Vocabulary knowledge but not MA mediates the effects of HLE on reading. • Domain-specific SL may help reduce the effects of a low SES environment on reading. The current study investigated the association between home environment and children’s reading outcomes, with a focus on the mediating roles of vocabulary and morphological awareness (MA) and the moderating roles of statistical learning (SL). A sample of 191 8-year-old Chinese children (92 girls) with diverse socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds completed assessments of vocabulary knowledge, MA, nonlinguistic visual and auditory SL, Chinese positional and phonetic SL, reading tasks, nonverbal reasoning, and verbal working memory. Results showed that both vocabulary and MA mediated the relationship between SES and reading, but only vocabulary mediated the relationship between home literacy environment (HLE) and reading. Importantly, children who were better in domain-specific SL, particularly those with strong Chinese radical positional SL, were less affected by SES disparities in reading outcomes. However, SL did not moderate the associations between HLE and reading outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Time for Consensus: Open Challenges and Recommendations for Research on Individual Differences in Statistical Learning

  2025-09-21

  articleOpen access

  Statistical learning (SL), the ability to extract regularities from sensory input, is hypothesized to play a major role in many aspects of higher-level cognition. While earlier investigations centered on group-level effects, a growing body of research now focuses on individual differences in this ability. This consensus paper presents the collective insights of 27 researchers worldwide who are active in the field of individual differences in SL, with the goal of reflecting on the field’s progress so far while outlining key challenges going forward. Our discussion covers possible theoretical and operational definitions of SL, the trade-offs between controlled laboratory tasks and ecologically valid paradigms, considerations in interpreting correlations between SL performance and other cognitive abilities, issues of measurement reliability and statistical power, and rationales for adopting individual-differences versus group-level approaches. Based on these discussions, we outline nine actionable recommendations for the field to move forward, which are meant to lead to a new body of evidence that is more theoretically informed and more methodologically robust.

  PublisherDOI

• Contribution of statistical learning in learning to read across languages

  PLoS ONE · 2024-03-25 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Statistical Learning (SL) refers to human's ability to detect regularities from environment Kirkham, N. Z. (2002) & Saffran, J. R. (1996). There has been a growing interest in understanding how sensitivity to statistical regularities influences learning to read. The current study systematically examined whether and how non-linguistic SL, Chinese SL, and English SL contribute to Chinese and English word reading among native Chinese-speaking 4th, 6th and 8th graders who learn English as a second language (L2). Children showed above-chance learning across all SL tasks and across all grades. In addition, developmental improvements were shown across at least two of the three grade ranges on all SL tasks. In terms of the contribution of SL to reading, non-linguistic auditory SL (ASL), English visual SL (VSL), and Chinese ASL accounted for a significant amount of variance in English L2 word reading. Non-linguistic ASL, Chinese VSL, English VSL, and English ASL accounted for a significant amount of variance in Chinese word reading. Our results provide clear and novel evidence for cross-linguistic contribution from Chinese SL to English reading, and from English SL to Chinese reading, highlighting a bi-directional relationship between SL in one language and reading in another language.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can explicit instruction boost statistical learning? A meta-analytical review.

  Journal of Educational Psychology · 2024-08-08 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A meta-analysis on the correlations between statistical learning, language, and reading outcomes.

  Developmental Psychology · 2023 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology

  < .001. Moreover, age, the writing system of the language, and SL paradigm moderate the strength of the association between SL and reading. Age is the only significant moderator on the strength of the association between SL and language. The findings from this meta-analysis shed light on the contribution of multiple factors that impact how SL relates to language and reading outcomes, with important implications for developing effective instructional practices that emphasize statistical regularities of oral and written materials in the classroom. Theoretical implications of these findings for language and reading development are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Sensitivity to derivational morphology as cues to lexical stress among English as second language learners

  Reading and Writing · 2023-12-12 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Meta-analysis on the Correlations Between Statistical Learning, Language and Reading Outcomes

  2023-04-30 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statisticallearning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. Acomprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson’s r). Results of our robust varianceestimation correlated effects model revealed a significant, moderate relation between SL andlanguage-related outcomes, r = 0.236, p &amp;lt; .001, and a significant, moderate relation between SLand reading-related outcomes, r = 0.239, p &amp;lt; .001. Moreover, age, the writing system of thelanguage, and SL paradigm moderate the strength of the association between SL and reading.Age is the only significant moderator on the strength of the association between SL andlanguage. The findings from this meta-analysis shed light on the contribution of multiple factorsthat impact how SL relates to language and reading outcomes, with important implications fordeveloping effective instructional practices that emphasize statistical regularities of oral andwritten materials in the classroom. Theoretical implications of these findings for language andreading development are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Automatic phonological access among bilinguals with cross-script languages

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2023-08-23 · 3 citations

  article

  This study investigated the hypothesis of nonselective access to phonological representations in an integrated lexicon across logographic and alphabetic writing systems among Chinese L1 (first language)-English L2 (second language) bilinguals. We employed three experiments to test this hypothesis, including a lexical decision task (LDT) and a word naming task in Experiments 1 and 2 using the masked priming paradigm, and a self-paced sentence reading task in Experiment 3. Results from the LDT and the word naming task showed a significant homophone priming effect from L1 to L2, but not from L2 to L1. In the sentence reading task, we compared processing time between homophone error words and control words in the critical and spill-over regions. A slower processing effect in the homophone condition was observed in the spill-over region. Overall, these findings suggest that phonological priming occurs across a logographic and an alphabetic script in different tasks, whether reading isolated words or sentences. Bilingual reading involves an integrated bilingual lexicon that is independent of script similarity.

  PublisherDOI

• Sensitivity to word endings as probabilistic orthographic cues to lexical stress among English as second language learners

  Memory & Cognition · 2023 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Psychology
  • Linguistics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Development of statistical learning ability across modalities, domains, and languages

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2022 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Min Wang

  University of Maryland, College Park

  3 shared

• Min Wang

  3 shared

• Joanne Arciuli

  2 shared

• Min Wang

  Yale University

  1 shared

• Nan Jiang

  1 shared

• Min Wang

  1 shared

• Nan Zhang

  Xi'an University of Science and Technology

  1 shared

• Joanne arciuli

  1 shared