I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for "hard science" on this. Just as you've provided an anecdote of "street kittens," I have personal anecdotes of children who grew up in abusive families who turned out to be very nice people. Of course, there may have been less visible setbacks in other parts of their development, but at the end of the day it's not a clear-and-cut A causes B to me.
So yea, you've caught me. I've been ruminating over an idea to make really short (1~2 mins) technical educational videos. They would explain technical concepts from my university courses that I found more challenging than they needed to be. So the majority audience would probably just be university students, but I imagine that the simpler/easier it is to understand, the more effective the material would be, especially since the videos would be so short.
> In your example, the burden of being a teenager in high school is far more cognitive overhead to the learner than if the educator is using singular or plural when describing a new concept.
I hadn't actually thought of this, but that makes a lot of sense to me. For a university student, the cognitive overhead might come predominantly from tight schedules, deadline stress, etc more than they do from any single set of subpar lectures slides.
That said, even if it's not that consequential, I'm still curious how much effect it has. I actually did end up asking ChatGPT for links to studies regarding this, and came back with 3 publications, but the titles and DOI links it provided didn't seem to match up. I couldn't find the first study by keyword either.
It gave me (DISCLAIMER: INACCURATE CITATIONS):
- Jackson, L. A., & Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Conceptual information processing and the use of singular and plural forms by children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3), 205–213. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.78.3.205