Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Examining Differences In Self-Concept And Language Between Monolingual And Bilingual Undergraduate Students, Marilyn Vega-Wagner

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The literature is lacking in studies that examine self-concept and language status among individuals older than adolescence. The purpose of this study is to conduct a quantitative nonexperimental comparative design to examine differences in self-concept and language status (monolingual or bilingual) between male and female undergraduate students in California. A total of 97 participants were examined in the study. The researcher conducted descriptive statistics on the demographics as well as a MANOVA and an ANOVA to answer the proposed research question. Based on the findings presented, the researcher failed to reject the null hypothesis of research question 1: There is …

The Maldivian Language Predicament: Language Loss Through The Lens Of Students, Azka Hassan

Senior Theses and Projects

This study dives into Maldivian students’ experiences of learning languages in classrooms, as well as how they perceive their proficiency in English relative to their first language, Dhivehi. I investigated the issue of language loss and its contributors via a qualitative study which consisted of 9 semi-structured 45-60 minute interviews with lower secondary Maldivian students who are in public schools in Male’ city. (Key stage 4, ages 13-17) Through this study, I argue that the Maldives is suffering from language loss among youth because students often have negative experiences in Dhivehi classrooms and feel pressure rooted in higher social and …

The Stability Of The Speech-To-Song Illusion And Individual Differences, Rodica R. Constantine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Music and language are easily distinguishable for the average listener despite sharing many structural acoustic similarities. The Speech-to-Song illusion can give rise to both musical and linguistic percepts by inducing a perceptual switch after listening to multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance. As such, it has been used as a tool to control for low-level acoustic characteristics previously shown to drive lateralized brain responses regardless of domain-type, helping to disambiguate the contribution of high- versus low-level processes in both music and speech perception. However, there exists a lack of research on how large a role individual differences such as …

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, …

The Fable Of Neuroplastic Lyra, Ricardo Twumasi

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This paper tells a folktale of two tribes and the neurodivergence that brought them together, through language and the patterns of the sounds that surrounded the tribes.

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Alex Higson for editing an early version of this article. Thanks to Maximin Lange, Lewis Burton, Juliet Foster, Sukhi Shergill and Oliver Runswick for your comments.

An Analysis Of Behavior Management Strategies Used Within Parent-Child Interaction Therapy To Facilitate Verbalizations By Children With Developmental Disabilities, Megan Barnes

Masters Theses, 2020-current

We examined the effects of the procedures recommended for interventions using the Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) protocols on child verbalizations. The effects of the procedures of Child-Directed Interaction (CDI) were examined in a non-concurrent multiple baseline across participants design. Two seven-year-old participants with developmental disabilities and language delay experienced a baseline condition followed by two experimental conditions during a free play environment. A range of child toys were rotated systematically throughout the study. The total number of therapist-child interactions remained consistent across all experimental conditions. The experimenter received bug-in-the-ear feedback about her use of the therapy components in order to …

Children’S Social Judgments Of Others On The Basis Of Dialect-Specific Vocabulary, Madison Myers-Burg

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many studies suggest that young children prefer speakers who speak similarly to them. Children demonstrate social preferences for speakers of their own native language over speakers of a non-native language as well as for speakers of a familiar accent over speakers of an unfamiliar accent. Recent research suggests that young children will similarly show preference for speakers who use familiar dialect-specific vocabulary over speakers who use vocabulary specific to an unfamiliar dialect. The current study investigated potential motivations behind young children’s preferences for familiar dialect-specific vocabulary. Fifty participants ages fifty-one months to ninety-five months (Mage =72.6 months) viewed an animated …

Language As The Medium: A Literature Review. Harnessing The Prolific Power Of Dramatic Language As A Therapeutic Tool In Drama Therapy, Edward Freeman

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Language in and of the theatre, with its palate of variegated writing styles and playwrights from throughout time, has the potential to be harnessed, focused, and systematized for use as a therapeutic tool within drama therapy – the field’s artistic medium. Drama therapy could benefit from having a specific medium germane to its artform which has the potential to provide practitioners with a common resource and means of communication, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, as well as align the field with other creative arts therapies. Language encompasses all forms of human communication – speaking, writing, signing, gesturing, expressing facially – …

The Cerebellum's Relationship To Language Function Following Perinatal Stroke, Carolina Alexis Vias

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While recent studies have demonstrated the association between the cerebellum and higher-order cognitive functioning, it is still unclear how volumetric differences of specific regions of interests within the cerebellum across typical and atypical development are related to language function. We have done so by measuring the volume of cerebellar subregions of healthy controls, and compared the volume to behavioral measures of language function. We then followed with an analysis of the cerebellum’s relationship to language function following perinatal stroke, which provides us with a greater knowledge of the impact of a cortical injury on cerebellar development and the cognitive outcomes …

Investigating The Use Of Mental-State Talk In Parent-Child Joint Reminiscing And Storytelling On Children’S Source Monitoring, Holly Autumn Nelson

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Source monitoring is the process of identifying and analyzing sources of information (Johnson et al., 1993). The ability to monitor source improves with age which places children at a greater risk for blending and misattributing information from different sources. Experiencing source confusions has academic, legal, and social implications, and thus understanding how source monitoring develops is important. Research exploring factors that impact source monitoring have predominantly focused on maturational aspects such as at which ages children learn to monitor source and neurological factors such as executive functioning. However, the impact of age and executive functioning may vary across the type …

Language Abilities As A Function Of Lateralization Of Language-Specific Brain Networks, Jacey Anderson

Honors Scholar Theses

The strength of hemispheric lateralization appears to be a good predictor of language abilities in children with developmental language impairments. Studies of healthy adults, in contrast, have generally failed to identify any association between degree of lateralization and language abilities, perhaps due to limited sensitivity to individual differences in standardized language assessments. This study used fMRI to measure the lateralization of functional task-engaged language networks in 25 healthy right-handed adults. Linear regressions examined lateralization indices (LI) of language activation in inferior temporal, superior temporal, and frontal brain networks, as a function of syntactic complexity (via story retelling), a grammaticality judgment …

Children's Use Of Accent As A Cue For Cooperative Potential, Rachel Stevens

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, several studies have shown that 5- and 6-year-old children make social judgments based on accent, consistently displaying a social preference for individuals who speak with a native accent. One theory hypothesizes that this preference to favor individuals who speak like us stems from our evolutionary history, during which accent and other language variations would have been strong, salient cues to group membership, and thus, cues to ones likelihood of cooperative behavior. The current study aimed to test this theory by determining if 5- and 6-year-old children use accent to make judgments about an individual’s cooperative potential. Participants …

Development Of Prefrontal Structure And Connectivity In Typical Children And Children With Adhd: Association With Language And Executive Function, Dea Garic

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The structure and connectivity of the prefrontal cortex has been extensively studied for its contribution to language and executive function (EF) development, but many questions still remain whether its microstructural tissue properties can reliably predict behavioral outcomes in very young typically and atypically developing populations. In particular, the bilateral frontal aslant tract (FAT) has garnered increasing interest with respect to its potential association with both language and EF, but has yet to be examined in childhood attention disorders, such Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). At the same time, with advances in diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), new diffusion models offer more …

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 …

Going Beyond Defining: Preschool Educators' Use Of Knowledge In Their Pedagogical Reasoning About Vocabulary Instruction, Julie Dwyer, Rachel E. Schachter

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Previous research investigating both the knowledge of early childhood educators and the support for vocabulary development present in early childhood settings has indicated that both educator knowledge and enacted practice are less than optimal, which has grave implications for children's early vocabulary learning and later reading achievement. Further, the nature of the relationship between educators' knowledge and practice is unclear, making it difficult to discern the best path towards improved knowledge, practice, and children's vocabulary outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to add to the existing literature by using stimulated recall interviews and a grounded approach to examine …

Motor-Language Cascades: How Fine Motor Relates To Language Outcomes Across Early Development, Sandy Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current dissertation examined the role of motor skills on children’s language outcomes across early development. For study one a systematic review was conducted to examine differences in how gross and fine motor skills foster language development from 0-5 years of age. Results based on 22 articles indicated that while both gross and fine motor skills are related to language outcomes, too few studies have measured fine motor skills to conclusively determine differences in how gross and fine motor skills differentially relate to language outcomes.

The aim of study two was to investigate whether gross or fine motor skills were …

Relationship Between Joint Attention And Language In Multiparous And Uniparous Households, Hannah C. Manis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The present study was designed to examine differences in the effect of the number of children in the household (also known as “parity”) on the relationship between initiating joint attention (IJA) and language development. We reasoned that infants who are only children (i.e., in uniparous homes), relative to infants who have one or more siblings (i.e., in multiparous homes), would have more opportunity to engage in IJA, and would, therefore, acquire a larger number of object labels. We tested the hypotheses that: 1) there would be a positive correlation between the number of IJA bids and language overall, and 2) …

The Role Of Dialect Words In Children’S Social Decisions, Madison Rose Myers-Burg

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent research suggests that young children are capable of distinguishing between phonetically dissimilar spoken accents, yet have difficulty distinguishing between phonetically similar accents (Wagner, Clopper, & Pate, 2013). The present study aimed to determine whether the presence of dialect-specific vocabulary enhances young children’s ability to categorize speakers. Participants completed four training trials in which they were familiarized with photos of two children: one of whom used American English labels for test objects and one of whom used British English labels. After training trials, participants completed eight test trials in which they were asked to infer which target child would use …

The Role Of Joint Attention In Pragmatic Language Development In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Ellen F. Geib

Clinical Psychology Dissertations

All children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present with some form of impairment in social communication. Social cognitive learning theory suggests children’s early joint attention skills provide a foundation for future language development. Preliminary research suggests social cognitive behaviors such as joint attention in the context of parent scaffolding may serve as a mechanism for language development in children with ASD. The current study utilized a parent-child free play task to explore the relations among parent and child attention and responsivity and child pragmatic language in 26 children ages 3:1 to 6:11 and their parents. Parent supported joint attention was …

The Development Of Spatial Vocabulary, Rosalie Odean

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has shown a link between the spatial words children use and their performance on spatial reasoning tasks. There is a dearth of measures of spatial language, especially those that focus on a specific type of word. This dissertation introduces three studies, using two measures of dimensional adjective comprehension, one in English and one in Spanish. Study one found that bilingual children’s knowledge of dimensional adjectives in one language is not predictive of their performance on dimensional adjectives in the other language, but that general vocabulary within a language predicts performance in that language. This study also showed that …

Creating Divergence: Examining The Development Of Creativity Through Executive Function, Language And Mindset, Brittany Nielsen Avila

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Creativity is a multifaceted construct influenced by task constraints (Glucksberg & Wesiberg, 1966; Runco, 1986), cognitive processes (Bijvoet-Van Den Berg, & Hoicka, 2014; Claxton, Pannells, & Rhoads, 2005) and motivational factors (dweck, 2006; lucas & nordgren, 2015), and is hypothesized to have significant "slumps" where the development slows, such as the "fourth-grade slump" (Torrance, 1967; 1968). The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesized "fourth-grade slump" in creativity and determine whether cognitive factors, such as executive function (i.e., cognitive control, Zelazo, Muller, Frye & Marcovitch, 2003), motivation factors (i.e., mindset and persistence), and situational factors (i.e., language …

The Influence Of Early Media Exposure On Children’S Development And Learning, Katherine Hanson

Doctoral Dissertations

A number of studies suggest that the amount of early screen media exposure is related to negative developmental outcomes, namely poorer executive functioning and language skills (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). Television’s constant presence in the home could lead to potentially serious consequences for infants and toddlers. However, hypotheses attributing long-term negative outcomes to the direct effects of television on children are limited. There are no definitive mechanisms to explain how these effects are instantiated within children over time. Furthermore, the indirect influences of television on children remain entirely unexplored. Television’s impact can have a potentially greater indirect effect on young …

The Role Of Language In The Development Of Temporal Cognition In 6- To 10-Year-Old Children, Danielle Denigris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to represent and make sense of time requires the mental representations of the ordering of events and temporal relations, abstract time concepts, natural biological rhythms, the self and other through time, and causal relationships. This representational ability undergoes significant refinement in middle childhood concurrent with advances in children’s language and nonverbal skills. This study explored the representational development of temporal cognition, diachronic thinking, and behavioral prediction in relation to a battery of language and nonverbal abilities with the aims of confirming age-related improvements, exploring whether disparate measures are indices of an underlying ability, and examining the role of …

Monolingual And Bilingual Children's Language-Based Social Preferences In A Predominantly Monolingual Environment, Rachel Marie Stevens

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Monolingual children consistently display Social preferences for individuals who speak their native language with a native accent compared to individuals who speak a foreign language or speak their native language with a foreign accent. Two explanations have been proposed for these language-based preferences. The first explanation is that language cues a child to in-group membership and children prefer to affiliate with individuals who are members of the same in-group. The second explanation is that children display preferences for their native language and accent because that is what they are most familiar with, and children prefer familiarity over the unknown. The …

The Bilingual Brain, Victoria A. James

Journal of Counseling and Psychology

This literature review explores the neurocognitive effects of the bilingual brain. Many areas of bilingualism are examined such as age of acquisition, which is when the second language is attained, and memory. The three types of bilingual memory are implicit memory, which is procedural memory, explicit memory, which is declarative memory, and episodic memory, which is autobiographical memory. In relation to the bilingual brain, cognition, control, and /lateralization are also reviewed. Finally, second language (L2) learning strategies are considered. The objective of this study is to obtain an understanding on how two or more languages are acquired and processed in …

Music And Language Development: Traits Of Nursery Rhymes And Their Impact On Children's Language Development, Ashley Lauren Gonzalez

Music

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the …

Building Categories To Guide Behavior: How Humans Build And Use Auditory Category Knowledge Throughout The Lifespan, Christina M. Vanden Bosch Der Nederlanden

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Although categorization has been studied in depth throughout development in the visual domain (e.g., Gelman & Meyer, 2011; Sloutsky 2010), there is little evidence examining how children and adults categorize everyday auditory objects (e.g., dog barks, trains, song, speech) or how category knowledge affects the way children and adults listen to these sounds during development. In two separate studies, I examined how listeners of all ages differentiated the multidimensional acoustic categories of speech and song and I determined whether listeners used category knowledge to process the sounds they encounter every day. In Experiment 1, listeners of all ages were able …

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 …

The Relation Between Infant Construction Strategy And Language Development In Toddlers, Gullnar Syed, Emily C. Marcinowski, Stacey C. Dusing, George F. Michel, Eliza L. Nelson

Undergraduate Research Posters

Infants learn from interaction with physical objects in their environments. Object construction, or merging individual objects into a single structure, has been linked previously to language. Items and toys can be structured and combined with similarity to word combinations (Greenfield, 1991). Infants initially combine 2 objects and then graduate on to combine 3 pieces or more. Words are put together in comparable ways, with each word corresponding to an object, and a sentence corresponding to a single structure. The purpose of this project is to explore how construction ability in infants affects language ability in toddlers. We hypothesize that the …

Evaluating The Role Of Social Approach Behaviors In Children With Autism, Jessica M. Weber

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children diagnosed with autism show marked impairments in social and communicative behaviors. According to social motivation and social orienting models of autism, decreased social interest leads to less social input and fewer social learning opportunities (Chevallier et al., 2012; Mundy & Neal, 2001). These models suggest that the ability to initiate and participate in social interactions are important factors in language development. Research in this area has focused on the role of joint attention in language development however; the current study takes a broad view of social interest and posits that not only joint attention, but all socially mediated behaviors …