Psychology Commons^™

Developing Early Semantic Networks And The Associative Structure Of Child Directed Speech, Thomas Hills, Josita Maouene, Brian Riordan, Linda Smith

Josita C Maouene

No abstract provided.

Contextual Diversity And The Associative Structure Of Adult Language In Early Word Learning, Thomas Hills, Josita Maouene, Brian Riordan, Linda Smith

Josita C Maouene

No abstract provided.

Sociological And Psychological Predispositions To Serial Murder, Katie Marie Krueger

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This paper looks specifically at the true definition of a serial killer, attempting to clarify the misleading depiction that has come from the media influence. Twenty-one people, including infamous murderers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, as well as more obscure killers, such as Carl Panzram, were studied in depth. Data was gathered from a variety of published sources on each convicted serial killer focusing on his/her life prior to the beginning of the killing spree. Unlike previous research on the topic, this investigation looked at a larger sample of serial killers, as well as a more complete set …

Correlations Between Body Parts And Types Of Argument Structure, Josita Maouene, Nitya Sethuraman, Mounir Maouene, Linda Smith

Josita C Maouene

No abstract provided.

Neural Correlates Of Verb Processing In The Developing Brain, Karin Harman James, Josita Maouene

Josita C Maouene

No abstract provided.

Homologies Between Relational Language And Bodily Action: First Steps Into An Embodiment Account Of Meaning, Asifa Majid, Daniel Casasanto, Karin Harman James, Josita Maouene

Josita C Maouene

No abstract provided.

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Knowledge? Action Manipulation, Parent-Child Discourse And Children’S Mental State Understanding In Pretense, Dawn K Melzer

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In the current study children 3-5 years of age (N = 75) participated in a mental state task to investigate the effect of action saliency on young children's appreciation of mental states during pretend play activities. They also engaged in a parent-child interaction period, including storybook reading and pretend play activities, in order to examine the relation between mental state term utterances and performance on the mental state task. Two actors appeared side-by-side on a television screen, either in motion or as static images; one actor had knowledge of the animal he was pretending to be; the other actor did …

The Humiliation Experience: Causes, Emotional Correlates, And Behavioral Consequences, Kendall Elyse Mccarley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research was to provide a comprehensive investigation of the emotional experience of humiliation by examining: (1) the direct effects of self-esteem and narcissism on emotional responses to potentially humiliating events; (2) the direct effects of the emotional correlates of humiliating experiences (i.e. sadness, humiliation, and anger) on the related behavioral reactions to such events (i.e., withdrawal, retaliation, and minimization); and (3) a process model to determine whether or not the emotional correlates of potentially humiliating events mediated the predicted effects of self-esteem and narcissism on the behavioral consequences on those events.

Participants, ranging in age from …

Longitudinal Analysis Of Early Semantic Networks Preferential Attachment Or Preferential Acquisition?, Thomas Hills, Mounir Maouene, Josita Maouene, Adam Sheya, Linda Smith

Josita C Maouene

Analyses of adult semantic networks suggest a learning mechanism involving preferential attachment: A word is more likely to enter the lexicon the more connected the known words to which it is related. We introduce and test two alternative growth principles: preferential acquisition— words enter the lexicon not because they are related to well-connected words, but because they connect well to other words in the learning environment—and the lure of the associates—new words are favored in proportion to their connections with known words.We tested these alternative principles using longitudinal analyses of developing networks of 130 nouns children learn prior to the …

Auditory Verb Perception Recruits Motor Systems In The Developing Brain: An Fmri Investigation, Josita Maouene, Karin Harman James

Josita C Maouene

This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4-6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs recruited motor systems in the frontal cortex during auditory perception, but the adjectives did not. Further evidence suggested that different types of verbs activated different regions in the motor cortex. The results demonstrate that the motor system is recruited during verb perception in the developing brain, reflecting the embodied nature of language learning and …

Categorical Structure Among Shared Features In Networks Of Early-Learned Nouns, Thomas Hills, Mounir Maouene, Josita Maouene, Adam Sheya, Linda Smith

Josita C Maouene

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun–feature networks. The networks are built from the overlap of words normatively acquired by children prior to 2½ years of age and perceptual and conceptual (functional) features acquired from adult feature generation norms. The resulting networks have small-world structure, indicative of a high degree of feature overlap in local clusters. However, perceptual features – due to their abundance and …