Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Executive Control In Hispanic Children: Considering Linguistic And Sociocultural Factors, Miriam M. Martinez

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Executive control represents a collection of high-order cognitive processes that are associated with important child outcomes, including academic achievement and social competencies. Despite the burgeoning interest in examining the development of executive control, less is known about the development of these skills among ethnic minority children. Hispanic children are currently the largest ethnic minority group in the United States and their diverse sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds provide an excellent context to study the influence of linguistic and sociocultural factors on the development of child executive control. The purpose of the three complementary studies reported in this dissertation is to contribute …

The New Normal: Goodness Judgments Of Non-Invariant Speech, Julia R. Drouin

Honors Scholar Theses

Previous research has found that perceptual learning, or normalizing the idiosyncratic phonemes of speech, causes a shift in speech sound category boundaries. The present study examined if perceptual learning was limited to the boundary or if also caused a shift in internal category structure. Seventeen individuals participated in three behavioral tasks to explicate this question. In the Lexical Decision task, participants were trained in either /s/-biasing or /ʃ/- biasing context. In the Goodness Judgment task, participants rated a continuum of sounds on perceived /s/ goodness using a designated scale. Finally, in the Phoneme Identification task, participants listened to the same …

What Residualizing Predictors In Regression Analyses Does (And What It Does Not Do), Lee H. Wurm, Sebastiano A. Fisicaro

Psychology Faculty Research Publications

Psycholinguists are making increasing use of regression analyses and mixed-effects modeling. In an attempt to deal with concerns about collinearity, a number of researchers orthogonalize predictor variables by residualizing (i.e., by regressing one predictor onto another, and using the residuals as a stand-in for the original predictor). In the current study, the effects of residualizing predictor variables are demonstrated and discussed using ordinary least-squares regression and mixed-effects models. Some of these effects are almost certainly not what the researcher intended and are probably highly undesirable. Most importantly, what residualizing does not do is change the result for the residualized variable, …

L2 Perception Of Spanish Palatal Variants Across Different Tasks, Christine Shea, Jeffrey Renaud

Spanish: Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [ɟʝ] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [ʝ] tends to occur in syllable onset in other contexts. We show that listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the palatal alternation depends upon the task and exposure to Spanish input. For native Spanish listeners, the palatal alternation boosts segmentation accuracy on an artificial speech segmentation task and also reduces latencies on a phonotactically-conditioned elision task. L2 …

Examining The Intersection Of The Cognitive Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Bilingual Brain, Irina Rabkina

Scripps Senior Theses

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van Heuven, & Conklin, 2013). The “bilingual disadvantage,” on the other hand, refers to bilinguals’ diminished performance on tasks that require word retrieval or switching between languages. This study examined the intersection of the bilingual advantage and the bilingual disadvantage to investigate whether they stem from a single cognitive control process. The …

Time, Perspectives, Verbs, And Imagining Events, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During the processing of verbs, readers form internal representations of the events described by those verbs. Two key elements in the construction of event representations are temporal information, given by the verbs that describe the represented events, and the visual perspective from which the events are represented. The current study is composed of two experiments aimed at examining the roles these two factors play in event representation. Specifically, the study aimed to determine how temporal information and visual perspective are represented during event imagination.

Experiment 1 investigated the role of temporal information associated with verbs, given by grammatical aspect (GA) …