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Age-Of-Acquisition (Aoa) Impacts Spelling Error Detection : Evidence From An Online Proofreading Task, Madison Laks

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

During reading, words are processed faster if they are rated as being acquired early in life compared to later in life (i.e., age of acquisition effects; AoA). Given that the task demands for proofreading differ from reading, we investigated if AoA effects extend to an online proofreading task. Specifically, early- and late-acquired target words were embedded in sentence frames after being matched for a variety of potentially confounding variables, including word frequency, length, imageability, OLD-20, and familiarity (using the stimulus set from Juhasz & Sheridan, 2020). The participants rapidly proofread these sentences for spelling errors, and our results showed that …

Genetic Implications Of Language Acquisition, Marissa Renee Ciccarini

Honors Scholar Theses

The argument about whether language acquisition is "nature" or "nurture" has been long debated. Linguists have concluded that it requires the two, but how much does language acquisition rely on nature? Children show the capacity to learn languages quickly and without much effort. While research suggests that infants absorb many visual and verbal cues in their environment, biological structures are the underlying component of how this knowledge is gathered and organized. The genetics that code for specific neurophysiological pathways affect how people interact with their environment and where information is stored, forming the basis for these biological structures. Genetic research …

Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Certain literary features of text (metaphor, idiom, etc.) are said to be foregrounded, or stand out from the surrounding text. Prior research (Miall & Kuiken, 1994) demonstrates that foregrounded text slows readers down, which is consistent with attention being grabbed. Do features of literary text, more specifically metaphors, improve memory as a result of being foregrounded? The present study investigated the effect of reading metaphoric phrases on reading time, memory accuracy, and decision times. We predicted that when a textual phrase was read as a metaphor, verbatim memory would be better retained than when that same phrase was read as …

The Origins Of The Iraq War: The Role Of Anthrax In The Weapons Of Mass Destruction Claims, John P. Koenig

Student Theses and Dissertations

The 2001 Anthrax Attacks were a critical factor in the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) claims that sparked the Iraq War. Despite its significance, little systematic work has been done regarding the topic. Existing studies primarily focus on the role of the Military Industrial Complex and intelligence failures as the primary explanations for the origins of the Iraq War. These explanations are limited, as they rely on hindsight biases. This thesis contends that anthrax was the catalyst for WMD claims that sparked the Iraq War. The 2001 Anthrax Attacks reinforced the belief that Iraq harbored WMDs and posed a threat …

What Cognitive Processes Drive Attentional Bias, And How Does Stress Affect Them?, Colton L. Hunter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Attentional biases toward or away from emotionally evocative stimuli have been well documented and related to clinical outcomes such as social anxiety. Some work has suggested that stress modulates attentional biases, but there are a number of inconsistencies in this literature regarding the direction of that modulation, highlighting a need to examine moderators of that effect. Sex differences in stress effects could potentially explain this inconsistency, as acute stress can affect males and females differently. It is also possible that stress differentially influences multiple component processes underpinning attentional bias, but these processes have not been well character, and to date …

Frequency, Form, And Function Of Dyadic Questions In Children With Autism: A Childes Corpus Study, Rhiannon Luyster, Isabella Leiwant, Sudha Arunachalam

Emerson Authors, Researchers, & Creators

Children’s questions to their caregivers – and caregivers’ questions to their children – play an important role in child development. For children on the autism spectrum, who often experience cognitive, linguistic and social difficulties, prior research on questions has resulted in inconsistent and incomplete findings. The present study characterized the frequency, form, and function of queries posed by children on the autism spectrum (n = 12), non-spectrum peers (n =20), and parents using the Nadig ASD English Corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results suggested that children on the autism spectrum and their caregivers produced fewer questions …

Working Memory And Language Associations In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Megan A. Goldfarb

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social communication and interaction, with repetitive behaviors or specialized interests. A range of language abilities is seen in ASD, with some having typical abilities and others severe impairments. Working memory (WM) deficits have also been found in some children with ASD. In typically developing, as well as non-ASD children with language deficits a strong relationship has been found between WM and language abilities. Although both language and WM deficits are often seen in ASD, the relationship between these deficits has been underexplored. The objective of this study is …

Comparing Comics And Illustrated Texts In Multimedia Learning, Jackson S. Pelzner

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this research was to examine how different forms of media, in particular science comics and illustrated texts, contribute to different patterns of learning. While the standard illustrated text seen in a textbook has been a useful tool for instruction, science comics appear to be an alternative that could be used in lieu of media that use the traditional illustrated text format. The comic format, known more for its visual appeal to readers, is consistent with the principles of the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2009), though comprehension may require different mechanisms (Cohn, 2013a). It was hypothesized …

Making Mistakes: Children’S Errors As Opportunities For Emergent Literacy Learning In Early Childhood, Clariebelle Gabas, Laura Cutler, Rachel E. Schachter

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

Errors are a natural part of children’s knowledge building and learning experiences in early childhood (EC). Importantly, errors can be a powerful tool for tailoring instruction to children’s specific needs and supporting learning processes (Seifried & Wuttke, 2010). The leveraging of errors to support children’s emergent literacy learning became apparent to us when we examined data from a recent observational study of teachers’ practices in EC classrooms with children 3–5 years old. In our study of 400 classrooms, we identified the 30 classrooms in which children demonstrated the highest language gains and the 30 classrooms in which children demonstrated the …

Creative Problem Solving Using Visual Thinking, Jacob L. Ravnborg

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Creative Problem Solving Using Visual Thinking

This project explores the concept of visual and semantic thinking and how they can be incorporated into Creative Problem Solving sessions. Visual thinking is the ability to conjure mental images as part of the thinking process. This type of thinking is hard-wired into the human brain and can be seen in individual behavior and language. Meanwhile, semantic thinking is using language and grammar to convey meaning. It is a sequential process that depends on cultural and social references. The project argues that both types of thinking are essential and recommends specific guidelines for including …

Women In Conflict: The Psychological Effect Of Propaganda In Conflict, Elizabeth Valerio-Boster

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In conflicts across the world, propaganda is used to encourage people to support causes whether than be freedom, revolution, or political or economic changes. Previous research has shown that propaganda that targets preexisting notions is particularly effective. Women have been found to be particularly susceptible to propaganda that has emotional implications. My research has been conducted to discover if propaganda that is centered around female empowerment is more effective in getting women to participate in conflict. I use accounts from women participating in conflicts to learn about the roles they play, and the number of women involved. These numbers are …

Racialized Experiences Of Covid-19: Help-Seeking Patterns In Response To Racial Discrimination Among Asian American College Students, Jeeyun Lee

Student Theses

In the United States, reported anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 164% from 2020 to 2021, with New York demonstrating a difference of 223% (Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, 2021). Ample evidence suggested its deleterious emotional impact; COVID-19-associated racial discrimination was found to be significantly associated with increased levels of mental distress, such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms (e.g., Hahm et al. 2021). With an aim of addressing the significant dearth of research on Asian Americans’ help-seeking behaviors in response to COVID-19-associated racism and distress, this study employed grounded theory to explore the experiences of 10 self-identified …

Bilingual Profiles Differentially Predict Executive Functions During Early Childhood: A Latent Profile Analysis, Hwajin Yang, Germaine Y. Q. Tng, Wee Qin Ng, Sujin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent studies suggest that heterogeneous bilingual experiences implicate different executive functions (EF) in children. Using a latent profile analysis, we conducted a more nuanced investigation of multifaceted bilingual experiences. By concurrently considering numerous bilingual indicators – age of L1 and L2 acquisition, interactional contexts of verbal exchanges, L1 and L2 proficiency, balance of language use at home and school, and receptive vocabulary – we identified three latent profiles (subgroups): balanced dual-language, dominant single-language, and mixed-interaction. We found that the balanced dual-language and dominant single-language profiles predicted significantly better switching than the mixed-interaction profile. However, no profile differences were found in …

Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

English (MA) Theses

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space …

Impacts Of Poverty On Language Development How Low Socio-Economic Status Students Are At An Academic Disadvantage, Farbod Samari

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Socioeconomic status impacts a variety of mental health outcomes, including language development. Delays in language development have consistently been linked to poverty. Decreases in vocabulary and phonological awareness are among developmental delays in school-aged children living in poverty. This research aims to contribute to the field of human services by examining the negative impacts of poverty on language development from a social worker’s perspective. As social workers thrive to serve disadvantaged populations, this research brings awareness to how language development deficiencies occur in school-aged children living in poverty.

To fulfill the purpose of this study, a quantitative, descriptive/explanatory design …

I Lie Awake, Pauline Juliet Ku

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Maggie Kim is a Korean American girl coming of age in Chicago and San Jose before moving to Pasadena, CA to study Biology at Caltech. Her struggles with her own sexuality, immediate family, growing up in an abusive church, traumatic memories and hallucinations and delusions make for a riveting read that validates her personal experience through trauma, stigma, and mental illness in the first-person point of view.

Assessing How Bilingual Experience Impacts Performance In Stimulus-Stimulus And Stimulus-Response Conflict Tasks, Christian Ruiz-Ortiz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Numerous studies have revealed that bilingual individuals outperform monolinguals in tasks requiring executive control. However, the exact impact of bilingualism on executive functions remains unclear due to inconsistent findings in the literature. These discrepancies may stem from factors such as participant demographics, variations in definitions and operationalizations of bilingualism, and task selection. To address these issues, we investigated the link between degree of balance and contextual use with the ability to address conflict across sensory modalities (auditory and visual) at different stages of processing. Rather than focusing on mean performance, this study investigated performance stability (coefficient of variation) over time …

Conceptual Understanding Of Skin Color Inheritance Among Immigrant Children And Adults, Fateme Mohseni

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Previous research on White American children and adults' perception of skin color inheritance found that they expect inheritable properties like skin color to have a greater range of possible outcomes compared to deterministic events like mixing two paints (Schwarzlose et al., 2021). However, it is unclear whether this generalizes to other populations. To address this gap, two studies explored this question with a non-White immigrant population of children and adults. To test individuals' skin color biases, in Study 1 children and adults from immigrant populations in the U.S. were asked to predict a biracial baby's skin color (a socially relevant …

University School Training Model Consultation Practica: Dismantling Anti-Black Racism With Predominately White Educators To Improve School, Family, Community Collaborations With Black Families And Community Stakeholders, Katherine L. Nelson, Joseph R. Morris

Journal of Human Services: Training, Research, and Practice

This article outlines a consultation case study facilitated in an urban elementary school through the University School Training Model (USTM) (Colles et al., 2019; Morris et al., 2016). The USTM is a collaboration between an APA accredited Counseling Psychology doctoral program and an urban school district to provide racially responsive counseling and consulting services and graduate level training. The case study details a consultation practica to improve school, family, and community collaborations in an urban elementary school with predominantly Black stakeholders and a predominantly White female school staff. The introduction, background, and self-evaluation of the consultation process are reviewed. Project …

Music & Synesthesia: An Exploration Of Synesthesia And Its Relation To Musical Perception, Raquel S. Johnson

Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference (PURCC)

This research investigates synesthesia and its impact on musical perception. Synesthesia is the multimodal sensory phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory modality generates the experience of a second, otherwise unrelated sense. Discussed topics include: a description of synesthesia and its neurophysiological and perceptual characteristics, the historical conceptualization and documentation of synesthesia beginning with the ancient Greeks, and present-day scientific inquiry. This research explores three varying types of auditory synesthesia - chromesthesia (sound-to-color synesthesia), auditory-tactile synesthesia, and sound-gustatory/sound-olfactory synesthesia - and their multimodal sensory characteristics in relation to music. Prominent neurophysiological hypotheses regarding the existence of synesthesia are examined, …

The Project That Claire, Uh I Mean The Student Completed: Relative Clauses And Repair Disfluencies, Claire O’Shaughnessy

Honors Theses

Several areas of psycholinguistics focus on the role of memory in language processing. Two of these areas are repair disfluencies and complex syntactic structures; however, these two topics have traditionally been investigated completely separately from one another. The current experiment combines these two topics by presenting listeners with spoken sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in which the semantic similarity between the critical noun phrases (NPs) was manipulated. In addition, the sentences could be spoken fluently, or there could be a repair disfluency in which the reparandum contained information that would be potentially helpful in …

Dental Fear, Anxiety, And Phobia – Behavioral Management And Implications For Dentists, Nadya Tsetsova Avramova

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences

Clinical management of patients with dental fear, anxiety, and phobia could be a major challenge to daily practice of dental professionals. The aim of the current review was to expand the modern consideration with respect to these issues, and therefore to discuss basic approaches and psychological techniques for management of oral health behaviors that should be employed in dentistry. This paper presents detailed description of the characteristics of dentist-patient therapeutic relationship as well as the most used techniques to cope with dental fear, anxiety, and phobia - relaxation techniques, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), hypnosis and melotherapy. We can still argue that …

Capturing The Racial Identities Of Latiné Students At A Mid-Size Texas University, Marlena Sandoval

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Cultural Concepts Of Distress And Clinical Intake Processes For Chinese And Chinese American Populations In The United States, Jasmina Harambasic

Undergraduate Theses

Research shows that Chinese Americans underutilize mental health services more than any other ethnic group in the U.S. This project aims to explore the mental health experiences of Chinese American and immigrant communities, with a specific focus on clinical intake processes, including interviews and screening assessments. Cultural concepts of distress refer to ways that cultural groups experience and communicate mental distress, and an exploration of these illness experiences within Chinese American populations can inform how to adapt or develop screening and interview tools to fully capture personal narrations of illness during intake processes in preparation for treatment. Challenges that may …

Main, Mediated, And Moderated Effects Of Participating In An After-School Social And Emotional Learning Program On Young Children's Development Of Social-Emotional Skills, Amy L. Cordier

Dissertations and Theses

Young children's social and emotional skills (SE skills) are highly predictive of the ease with which they transition to kindergarten as well as their success in the K-12 school system and in life after graduation. Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds often enter kindergarten with less well-developed SE skills and lag their peers throughout their school careers. Studies of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs indicate that these programs are successful in teaching SE skills, both in school and in after-school programs. However, less is known about the mechanisms of changes through which SEL programs improve children's SE skills and for …

Experiences Of Post-Master's Arts Based Supervision With Art Therapists Of Color, Madoka Urhausen

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This study explored experiences of art therapists of color who underwent post-master’s arts-based supervision (ABS) to obtain an art therapy credential. ABS emphasizes creation of clinical insight and knowledge through not only reviewing and evaluating client’s art and art processes but also having supervisees to engage in their own artmaking in response to their clinical work. The sample was chosen for their intersectional identities that added a layer of complexity to their identity formation. This qualitative phenomenological study employed Culturally Responsive Focus Group (CRFG) with Arts-based Research (ABR) methodology to explore two questions: (1) What are the experiences of …

Delayed Autism Diagnosis In Girls Due To Social Masking, Madeline Abram-Moyle

Student Research Symposium

Objective: To determine if camouflaging social and linguistic skills delays autism diagnosis in girls ages 6-18 years old compared to boys of the same age.

Methods: A rapid review from PubMed database to review relevant evidence.

Results: Evidence that social and linguistic camouflaging lead to delayed diagnosis in autistic girls compared to autistic boys is strong, but evidence is lacking that these forms of camouflaging lead to poor mental health in autistic girls ages 6-18.

Conclusion: Diagnostic criteria for autism should be updated to include female behavior and language patterns.

Music Training And Cognitive Function, Madilyn Waters, Michiko Nohara-Leclair

2023 Student Academic Showcase

Music training is defined as the instruction on a musical instrument, and it requires the simultaneous use of several cognitive functions: perception, memory, attention, and learning, in particular. I set out to determine if any associations exist between music training and increased cognitive function. After extensive research on various topics, I discovered that there are several significant associations between cognition and music training. Dementia, as well as other cognitive impairments, were shown to occur less in individuals that participated in music training. Attention, working memory, and intelligence showed significant positive associations with music training. Also, music training can also be …

The Influence Of Native Language And Sentence Form On Memory Of Motion Events, Stephanie L. Lopez

LSU Master's Theses

This study utilized four experiments to investigate the extent to which native language influences memory in accordance with linguistic relativity. In Experiment 1, monolingual English speakers and Spanish/English bilinguals were divided into a verbal encoding condition and a verbal suppression encoding condition and watched motion events of low or high physical salience. Participants engaged in a recognition memory task followed by an event memory similarity judgment task. In Experiment 2, native monolingual English speakers were divided into an English-like (or manner-on-verb) description group, a Spanish-like (or path-on-verb) description group, mimicking the language groups of Experiment 1 respectively, and a verbal …

The What And When Of Psychomotor Retardation: A Multimodal Approach, Ole Edvard Granrud

LSU Master's Theses

Psychomotor retardation (PMR) is a diagnostic criterion that reflects a gross slowing of movement, speech, and thought. More so, PMR is a transdiagnostic, pervasive source of impairment and distress that can be observed across disorders, such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Schizophrenia (SZ), and Bipolar Disorder (BD). In clinical settings, PMR is associated with more severe psychopathology and is used to both inform treatment and predict long-term treatment outcomes. However, despite being clinically meaningful, PMR is poorly understood and is often conceptualized as a motor disturbance that happens in isolation from, rather than concurrently with, higher-order cognitive-emotional processes – such …