Psychology Commons^™

Conceptual Representation Changes In Indonesian-English Bilinguals, Andree Hartanto, Lidia Suarez

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referred to a male or female person or animal. In order to explore conceptual representations, we divided the words into gender-specific and gender-ambiguous words. Gender-specific words were words in which conceptual representations contained gender as a defining feature, in both English and Indonesian (e.g., uncle). In contrast, gender-ambiguous words were words in which gender was a defining feature …

Language Use Statistics And Perceptual Simulation In Language Processing, Alena Hejl

Linguistics Honors Projects

Humans’ ability to comprehend language seems to rely on both mental reconstructions of what we have experienced in the world and statistically-based expectations of how language is used. This study adapted a comparison of perceptual and statistical explanations of word comprehension in the auditory modality. Participants completed a series of trials in which they heard cue words, some of which were spatially oriented (e.g., sky, ground), and then completed a letter identification task. In this task, the letter appeared on the computer screen in either a congruent location or an incongruent location. The position of the letter at the top …

Improving Head Start Teachers' Concept Development: Long Term Follow-Up Of A Training Program And Differences In Program Impact, Amanda Kr Lipp

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Children from a low socioeconomic status (SES) home environment are typically exposed to less vocabulary during the first few years of life and experience higher rates of poor school readiness, particularly in emergent literacy skills, when compared to middle-class peers (Bowey, 1995; Hart & Risley, 2003; Whitehurst, 1997). Early childhood education programs designed to expose this group to cognitively challenging utterances have found that low SES children tend to make greater gains in vocabulary development compared to middle-class peers (Justice, Meier, & Walpole, 2005).

Language And Cognition: Insight From Exceptional Cases, Anna Snyder

Senior Honors Theses

The understanding of the world in the human mind is accomplished through cognitive processing and articulated through linguistic processing. Undoubtedly, there is a significant connection between language and cognition because of how intricately they work together to create and express meaning. Researchers from a variety of fields have sought to discover the specifics of these domains to determine what kind of relationship exists between them and how the involvement between language and cognition should be best represented. Though they obviously interact, the different characteristics of each domain provide evidence that linguistic processes and cognitive processes may be distinct. Rather than …

Tempo Perception Across Cultures: The Beat Is All It Takes, Kendall L. Lyons, Jessica E. Nave-Blodgett, Erin E. Hannon

AANAPISI Poster Presentations

• Dancing to music is a human universal that relies on beat perception.
• Listeners may infer the “tempo” or speed of music from:
• the time interval between beats;
• the density of events;
• higher-level features of musical temporal organization (the meter).
• The “Gabbling Foreigner Illusion” is the observation that listeners perceive unfamiliar languages as being faster than familiar ones.
• Even when music is the same speed, listeners tap faster to unfamiliar music.
• Does culture background impact how we perceive musical tempo?