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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

A Comprehensive Study Of Neural Entrainment In Developmental Language Disorder And Reading Disability, Christine Moreau Mar 2024

A Comprehensive Study Of Neural Entrainment In Developmental Language Disorder And Reading Disability, Christine Moreau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Prior research has suggested that reading disability (RD, dyslexia) and developmental language disorder (DLD) stem from deficits in rhythmic auditory processing, specifically in synchronizing neural oscillations (Cumming et al., 2015; Goswami, 2011). Speech relies on rhythmic patterns for signaling linguistic information at multiple timescales (e.g., phonemes, syllables; Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). The disruption of regular neural entrainment is hypothesized to lead to difficulties in processing fast acoustic changes in speech, negatively affecting phonological processing, and speech segmentation. In this dissertation, I studied neural entrainment to uncover possible areas of impairment related to speech tracking, which could help inform interventions. In …


Developmental Differences In The Learning And Consolidation Of Linguistic Regularities, Sarah Berger Jul 2022

Developmental Differences In The Learning And Consolidation Of Linguistic Regularities, Sarah Berger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Relative to adults, children have a well-known advantage for learning linguistic regularities, which could be partially driven by their deeper sleep. To examine the relationship between consolidation and language learning across development, children and adults learned a novel article system with an implicit grammatical rule. Participants performed a judgment task on phrases containing the novel articles before and after a night of EEG-monitored sleep. We found that rule sensitivity emerged rapidly in children, whereas it did not emerge until the second session in adults. Children demonstrated better generalization of the rule than adults. Consolidation effects showed a developmental double dissociation, …


Neural Markers Of Musical Memory In Young And Older Adults, Avital Sternin Sep 2021

Neural Markers Of Musical Memory In Young And Older Adults, Avital Sternin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Memory for music can be preserved in the presence of neurodegenerative disorders even when other memories are forgotten. However, understanding how the brain remembers music has proven difficult despite decades of research. The central goal of this thesis was to elucidate the neural correlates of musical memory by exploring how the presence of language and music information affect the way young and older adults remember music. To that end, I 1) used a controlled training paradigm to familiarize participants with novel stimuli that manipulated the presence of language and music, and 2) collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data to compare …


Construction And Preliminary Validation Of The Interrai 0-3 Developmental Domains, Jo Ann M. Iantosca Mar 2020

Construction And Preliminary Validation Of The Interrai 0-3 Developmental Domains, Jo Ann M. Iantosca

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background. With no standardized approach for early assessment of childhood development in Canada, and with a lack of a comprehensive assessment-to-intervention system that amalgamates social, psychiatric, medical, functional, psychological, and environmental constructs, the interRAI 0-3 was developed to support intervention efforts based on the needs of young children and their families. The interRAI 0-3 includes over 650 items that seek clinical information, developmental milestones, and context items regarding the family and social relationships surrounding the child. The newly developed interRAI 0-3 was most recently evaluated to examine the reliability and validity of the Expressive and Receptive Language and the Gross …


The Impact Of Statistical Learning On Language And Social Competency In Asd And Adhd: Divergent Findings, Kaitlyn M.A Parks Sep 2019

The Impact Of Statistical Learning On Language And Social Competency In Asd And Adhd: Divergent Findings, Kaitlyn M.A Parks

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical learning is a process that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment and plays an important role in language acquisition, speech segmentation, and aspects of social behaviour. Little is known about the contribution of statistical learning impairments on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) related traits. The current study examined whether impairments in auditory and visual statistical learning are related to ASD and ADHD traits, language, and social competency. Decreased auditory, but not visual statistical learning abilities was related to increased autism traits and visual statistical learning and social competency abilities were mediated by language comprehension. …


Conceptual Representation In Bilinguals: A Feature-Based Approach, Eriko Matsuki Dec 2018

Conceptual Representation In Bilinguals: A Feature-Based Approach, Eriko Matsuki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A challenge for bilinguals is that translation equivalent words often do not convey exactly the same conceptual information. A bilingual exhibits a “semantic accent” when they comprehend or use a word in one language in a way that is influenced by knowledge of its translation equivalent. Semantic accents are well-captured by feature-based models, such as the Distributed Conceptual Feature model and the Shared (Distributed) Asymmetrical model, however, few empirical studies have used semantic features to provide direct evidence for these models. The goal of this thesis is to use a feature-based approach to identify conceptual differences in translation equivalent words …


Abstract And Concrete Concepts According To Word Association, Daniel Nedjadrasul Aug 2017

Abstract And Concrete Concepts According To Word Association, Daniel Nedjadrasul

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In psychology, the abstract/concrete distinction refers to a distinction among concepts, which is typically characterized as follows. Concrete concepts are those whose referents can be experienced through sensation/perception, such as dog or pond, whereas abstract concepts are those whose referents lack this attribute, such as truth (Wiemer-Hastings & Xu, 2005; Connell & Lynott, 2012; Brysbaert, Warriner, & Kuperman, 2014). This thesis describes and, using word association, tests several theories of conceptual representation motivated by the abstract/concrete distinction (or, where not motivated by it, with potential implications related to it). These include Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986, 2007), Perceptual Symbol …


Eyetracking Of Coarticulatory Cue Responses In Children And Adults, Alexandra M. Cross Jul 2015

Eyetracking Of Coarticulatory Cue Responses In Children And Adults, Alexandra M. Cross

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Studies examining sensitivity to coarticulatory cues during spoken word recognition have typically examined children and adults separately. The present thesis compared sensitivity to coarticulatory cues in school-aged children and adults using eyetracking. Children and adults listened to words containing congruent and incongruent coarticulatory cues while looking at a two-picture display. Contrary to theories positing weakened attention to phonetic detail in children, we observed equal or greater sensitivity to coarticulatory cues in children compared to adults. This effect was related to predictors of reading and language proficiency, and was also modulated by phoneme contrasts such that children were overly sensitive to …


Event-Related Potential Markers Of Perceptual And Conceptual Speech Processes In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness., Stephen T. Beukema Jul 2015

Event-Related Potential Markers Of Perceptual And Conceptual Speech Processes In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness., Stephen T. Beukema

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) patients behaviorally demonstrate absent or fluctuating levels of awareness. Functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of covert perceptual and semantic speech processing provides prognostic value for these patients. In this thesis, I examined the utility of high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in this regard. A contrast between event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by primed and unprimed word pairs was used to isolate conceptual (semantic) processes, while ERPs elicited by signal-correlated noise were contrasted with those elicited by speech to isolate pre-semantic, perceptual aspects of speech processing. These ERP effects were found to be both temporally and …


The Influence Of Proficiency And Age Of Acquisition On Second Language Processing: An Fmri Study Of Mandarin-English Bilinguals, Emily S. Nichols Jul 2013

The Influence Of Proficiency And Age Of Acquisition On Second Language Processing: An Fmri Study Of Mandarin-English Bilinguals, Emily S. Nichols

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Research investigating the neural correlates of second language (L2) processing has usually studied age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency separately. Presently, we examined both in parallel, treated as continuous variables. We used fMRI to study neural activity for L2 processing in adult native Mandarin speakers who are L2 English speakers. Behavioral measures of language proficiency and AoA were obtained from subjects prior to performing a picture-word matching task during an fMRI scan. Brain activity during L2 English processing was shown to be independently affected by AoA and proficiency; activity in left superior temporal gyrus and right parahippocampal gyrus was modulated …