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The Role Of Multiple Object Views In Early Word Learning: A Dynamic Process, Abigail Julian Dimercurio

Doctoral Dissertations

Word learning is a complex process that involves multiple interacting components. One of these components is the motor system. During the first few years of development, the onset of motor skills predicts the development of language skills such that earlier onsets of crawling and walking relate to greater vocabulary sizes. It is thought that this relationship occurs due to a developmental cascade where gaining locomotive skills allows for greater environmental exploration, thus, more opportunities to learn new words. One area of interest in this cascade is object manipulation. Moving objects in a way that creates multiple views is related to …

Audiovisual Speech Processing: Implications For Speech Perception And Language Development, Ryan Andrew Cannistraci

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation aims to empirically assess the complex, multileveled relationships between audiovisual speech perception and early language development. The majority of extant language development research has justifiably focused on infants’ ability to learn language from auditory input, and indeed, infants are precocious auditory learners (Saffran & Kirkham, 2018). Complementary to auditory speech, however, are the necessarily redundant facial movements used to articulate speech. Outside of language development research, multimodal processing has been theorized to facilitate perceptual learning and cognitive development (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000), but only a small number of empirical studies have investigated how audiovisual speech perception in infancy …

Neural Correlates Of Individuation And Subordinate-Level Categorization Of Other-Race Faces In Infancy, Kelly Roth

Doctoral Dissertations

Perceptual narrowing is a domain-general process in which infants move from a broad sensitivity to a wide range of stimuli to developing expertise within often experienced native stimuli (Maurer & Werker, 2014). One outcome of this is the own-race bias, characterized by an increasing difficulty in discriminating other-race faces with age and experience for those raised in a racially homogenous environment (Anzures, Quinn, Pascalis, Slater, Tanaka, & Lee, 2013). Recent theorists have proposed that this is due to a categorization-individuation process, wherein infants begin to categorize non-native stimuli, such as other-species’ faces, but individuate native stimuli, such as often-experienced human …

The Effect Of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder And Child Temperament On Mother-Child Synchrony, Christina Gabriela Mena

Doctoral Dissertations

Maternal borderline personality disorder (BPD) and difficult child temperament have individually been associated with reduced quality of mother-child interactions. The current study examined synchrony (a dyadic construct measuring quality of interaction) during a coded observational task in a sample of mothers with BPD and their young children ages 4-7 (n = 36) compared to normative comparisons (n = 34). These mothers’ self-reported borderline features were also used to examine dyad synchrony across the sample as a whole. We also examined the association between child temperament and synchrony as well as the potential moderating effect child temperament has on the relationship …

Infant Locomotor Skill Development In The Context Of Mother-Infant Interactions, Sabrina Lynn Thurman

Doctoral Dissertations

The acquisition of locomotor skills and transitions within them leads to changes in infants’ exploratory abilities and interactive behaviors, which affects several aspects of parent-infant exchanges. Here, we tracked how the onset of crawling and walking affected both infants’ and mothers’ spatial exploration, interactive behaviors, and use of postures in 10-minute free play sessions held in a laboratory setting. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed longitudinally with biweekly sessions occurring from before crawling onset until infants had two months walking experience. We focused on two 6-session transition periods centered around the onsets of hands-and-knees crawling and walking. Behavioral data …

United States Elite Youth Tennis Athletes’ Use Of Psychological Strategies In Competition, Emily Earlynn Lauer

Doctoral Dissertations

Young athletes are routinely faced with stressors and competitive structures that collegiate and adult athletes face. Psychological skills training (PST) can provide young athletes with strategies and skills to cope with these stressors and ultimately influence sport performance (Vealey, 2007). To date, the only study exploring in-competition experiences of young athletes was with participants between 16 and 18 years of age (Van Raalte, Brewer, Rivera, & Petitpas, 1994). The current study is the first investigation on the in-competition experiences of children and adolescents in sport. Twelve elite young tennis athletes (M[subscript]age = 11.83) who trained within a Player Development program …

Influences On Self-Regulated Learning In Low-Income Children: Examining The Role Of Private And Social Speech As Self-Regulation Tools, Lisa Ann Connor

Doctoral Dissertations

Self-regulated learning (SRL) allows children to become autonomous learners through facilitating their active planning, monitoring, and evaluation of their performance in the classroom. Low-income children have been found to exhibit lower SRL abilities compared to middle-class children. SRL is linked to a number of long-term academic outcomes, and thus, understanding what contributes to this ability is essential for intervention. One potential mediator of children’s emerging SRL abilities is language. Social Constructivist Theory provides a lens to view this relationship between language and SRL, denoting the importance of both the physical and social dimensions of the classroom when examining cognitive development. …

How Technology Interacts With Emerging Adulthood Psychosocial Developmental Tasks: An Examination Of Online Self-Presentation And Cell Phone Usage, Samantha Lynn Gray

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation outlines three distinct, yet interrelated, projects aimed at understanding the role of technology in relation to emerging adulthood developmental tasks: individuation & identity development. The first paper provides a context for understanding the developmental tasks of emerging adulthood, and the role that technology may serve in relation to those developmental tasks. This brief review of the literature on emerging adulthood developmental tasks provides a solid theoretical background and history for the theoretical premises proposed for the respective studies included in this dissertation. The second project is an empirical investigation that seeks to understand how the task of identity …

Effects Of Stimulus Symmetry On Hierarchical Processing In Six-Month-Old Short- And Long-Looking Infants, Margaret Weinel Guy

Doctoral Dissertations

The current study investigated the effects of stimulus symmetry on the processing of global and local stimulus properties by 6-month-old short- and long-looking infants through the use of event-related potentials (ERPs). When compared with asymmetry, symmetry has been associated with more efficient stimulus processing and more accurate memory for stimulus configuration (Attneave, 1955; Perkins, 1932). Previous research has shown that individual differences in infant visual attention are related to hierarchical stimulus processing, such that short lookers show a precedence effect for global processing, while long lookers demonstrate a local processing precedence (Guy, Reynolds, & Zhang, 2013). Based on the Information …

5- And 8-Month-Olds’ Visual Exploration Of 2d Scenes: The Relative Impact Of Object Size, Object Detail, And Depth Cue On Infants’ Visual Attention, Yu Guan

Doctoral Dissertations

How infants visually explore complex scenes containing objects varying in size, depth cues, and amount of detail is still an open question. When infants are presented with a complex scene, we do not know which dimensions of the scene are more likely to catch their attention first, and which are more likely to sustain their looking duration the most. This study aimed to investigate how infants’ explore 2D displays containing different combinations of object size, depth cues, and detail.

In experiment 1, forty infants (twenty of 5 months old and twenty of 8 months old) were presented with stimuli containing …

The Intersection Between Home And School: Developing A Scale To Measure Parental Perceptions Of Childhood School Stress, Teresa Marie Henke

Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

Parents in the home and educators in the schools are key adults in the most important contexts in the daily lives of school-age children. In the demanding, achievement, and accountability oriented culture of today, it is expected that children experience normal everyday stressors as they move between these two environments. The impact of stress related to daily hassles has been reported to have both cognitive and physical effects on the present and future well-being of children. This study represented an attempt to advance the understanding of childhood stress in the intersection between school and home by investigating the perceptions …

Mindfulness And Self-Compassion: Exploring Pathways To Adolescent Emotional Well-Being, Karen Leslie Bluth

Doctoral Dissertations

Adolescents today are confronted with the compounded stressors of life in our high-pressured society and the cognitive, physiological, and emotional changes that are characteristic of this stage of development. As a result, they often struggle with self-doubt, leading to depression, anxiety, and maladaptive trajectories. Mindfulness, or paying attention in the moment in an intentional and purposeful way, has been reported to have positive effects on emotional well-being in adults, and shows promise for similar results in recent research with children and adolescents.

Moreover, the mechanisms through which being mindful achieves positive outcomes has only recently been explored, and has not …

Positive Functioning Among Chinese Adolescents: Conceptualizing A Framework And Testing Effects Of Parenting, Mingzhu Xia

Doctoral Dissertations

Chinese adolescents’ development has received increasing attention over recent decades. However, following a traditional deficit model, most of the attention has been on problematic functioning of adolescents (e.g. depression). This emphasis is not consistent with evidence that the large majority of Chinese adolescents do not manifest such problem behaviors. Little is known about positive functioning among Chinese adolescents and how it is related to key socialization practices such as parenting. The purpose of the present study was to begin to fill these gaps.

Using theory, past empirical practice, and characteristics of Chinese culture, the study posited a second-order structure for …

Juvenile Competence To Stand Trial: An Examination Of The Effects Of Cognitive Ability, Psychiatric Symptomatology, And Psychosocial Maturity, Aaron John Kivisto

Doctoral Dissertations

As the courts have evolved over the past 30 years towards increasingly punitive sanctions for youthful offenders, the fundamental protections afforded to adult defendants have become increasingly relevant for youthful offenders. Among these protections, the right of juveniles to be competent to stand trial has gained nearly universal recognition throughout this country’s courts. Congruent with theory and previous research, we hypothesized that age, intellectual ability, psychiatric symptomatology, and maturity would all be directly related to adolescents’ competence. It was also anticipated that adolescents in the detention sample would evidence lower maturity and competency-related abilities compared to the community sample. Expanding …

The Impact Of Repeated Sensory-Motor Experience With Multimodal Objects Upon The Emergence Of Infant Reaching, Joshua L Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Previous studies found that providing infants with repeated opportunities for reaching improved the emergence and quality of the behavior, presumably via exploratory and selective processes (Bojczyk & Corbetta, 2004; Lobo et al., 2008). Here we further examined the effects of opportunities for reaching by exposing infants to multimodal objects that were activated either continuously by a hidden motor or contingently by hand-toy contact. We asked if such objects would motivate infants to try to reach for them even more than still and silent objects.

Forty-four pre-reaching infants were recruited within the week prior to turning three months of age and …

Emotion Regulation As A Mediator Of Adolescent Developmental Processes And Problem Outcomes, Katherine Little Kivisto

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent models of adolescent development and psychopathology emphasize the importance of the social regulation of emotion during adolescence (Allen & Manning, 2007; Allen & Miga, 2010), and emotion regulation as a mediating factor between multiple aspects of adolescent development and adolescent adjustment (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). The present dissertation investigated these two phenomena in two separate studies of adolescent development, emotion regulation, and psychological adjustment.

In study one, a new measure of adolescent social regulation of emotion – the Managing Distress Interpersonally Scale, or MANDI – showed good internal consistency, test-retest reliability and factor structure across two …

Personality Traits And Career Decidedness: An Empirical Study Of University Students, Ryan M. Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Research on vocational behavior has made progress in identifying broad personality traits associated with career indecision; however, important questions remain unanswered about the temporal stability of relationships between broad personality traits and Career Decidedness (CD), and about the role of narrow personality traits as predictors of CD, both of which were addressed in this longitudinal field study. A total of 2,046 undergraduate students completed an online personality inventory and CD questionnaire. A sub-group (N=267) responded to a follow-up questionnaire seven months later. Results indicated, as hypothesized, that CD correlated positively with the broad (Big Five) personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, and …

Type I Diabetes Mellitus In Children And Pre-Adolescents: Affective, Behavioral, And Social Correlates, Meredith P. Schwartzman

Doctoral Dissertations

Type I diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is the most common metabolic disorder among children and adolescents (Wysocki, Greco, & Buckloh, 2003) and research has indicated that children with T1DM are more likely to develop clinical depression and anxiety relative to children without T1DM. Building on this literature, the present study utilized a multi-method assessment strategy of self- and parent-reported depression, anxiety, behavioral regulation (i.e. internalizing and externalizing behaviors), social competence, personality, and family dynamics to identify whether preadolescents with T1DM were distinguishable from children without T1DM, and also whether psychosocial differences were evident in the T1DM group as a function of …