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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Skidmore Clips Of Neutral And Expressive Scenarios (Scenes): Novel Dynamic Stimuli For Social Cognition Research, Casey Schofield, Justin Weeks, Lea Taylor, Colten Karnedy Dec 2015

Skidmore Clips Of Neutral And Expressive Scenarios (Scenes): Novel Dynamic Stimuli For Social Cognition Research, Casey Schofield, Justin Weeks, Lea Taylor, Colten Karnedy

Psychology

Social cognition research has relied primarily on photographic emotional stimuli. Such stimuli likely have limited ecological validity in terms of representing real world social interactions. The current study presents evidence for the validity of a new stimuli set of dynamic social SCENES (Skidmore Clips of Emotional and Neutral Expressive Scenarios). To develop these stimuli, ten undergraduate theater students were recruited to portray members of an audience. This audience was configured to display (seven) varying configurations of social feedback, ranging from unequivocally approving to unequivocally disapproving (including three different versions of balanced/neutral scenes). Validity data were obtained from 383 adult participants …


Toddlers Encode Similarities Among Novel Words From Meaningful Sentences, Erica H. Wojcik, Jenny R. Saffran Jan 2015

Toddlers Encode Similarities Among Novel Words From Meaningful Sentences, Erica H. Wojcik, Jenny R. Saffran

Psychology

Toddlers can learn about the meanings of individual words from the structure and semantics of the sentences in which they are embedded. However, it remains unknown whether toddlers encode similarities among novel words based on their positions within sentences. In three experiments, two-year-olds listened to novel words embedded in familiar sentence frames. Some novel words consistently occurred in the subject position across sentences, and others in the object position across sentences. An auditory semantic task was used to test whether toddlers encoded similarities based on sentential position, for (a) pairs of novel words that occurred within the same sentence, and …


The Ontogeny Of Lexical Networks Toddlers Encode The Relationships Among Referents When Learning Novel Words, Erica H. Wojcik, Jenny R. Saffran Jan 2013

The Ontogeny Of Lexical Networks Toddlers Encode The Relationships Among Referents When Learning Novel Words, Erica H. Wojcik, Jenny R. Saffran

Psychology

Although the semantic relationships among words have long been acknowledged as a crucial component of adult lexical knowledge, the ontogeny of lexical networks remains largely unstudied. To determine whether learners encode relationships among novel words, we trained 2-year-olds on four novel words that referred to four novel objects, which were grouped into two visually similar pairs. Participants then listened to repetitions of word pairs (in the absence of visual referents) that referred to objects that were either similar or dissimilar to each other. Toddlers listened significantly longer to word pairs referring to similar objects, which suggests that their representations of …


Remembering New Words: Integrating Early Memory Development Into Word Learning, Erica H. Wojcik Jan 2013

Remembering New Words: Integrating Early Memory Development Into Word Learning, Erica H. Wojcik

Psychology

In order to successfully acquire a new word, young children must learn the correct associations between labels and their referents. For decades, word-learning researchers have explored how young children are able to form these associations. However, in addition to learning label-referent mappings, children must also remember them. Despite the importance of memory processes in forming a stable lexicon, there has been little integration of early memory research into the study of early word learning. After discussing what we know about how young children remember words over time, this paper reviews the infant memory development literature as it relates to early …


Toddlers Activate Lexical Semantic Knowledge In The Absence Of Visual Referents: Evidence From Auditory Priming, Jon A. Willits, Erica H. Wojcik, Mark S. Seidenberg, Jenny R. Saffran Jan 2013

Toddlers Activate Lexical Semantic Knowledge In The Absence Of Visual Referents: Evidence From Auditory Priming, Jon A. Willits, Erica H. Wojcik, Mark S. Seidenberg, Jenny R. Saffran

Psychology

Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children's lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. In Experiment 1, looking times to a repeating spoken word stimulus (e.g., kitty-kitty-kitty) were shorter for trials preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., dog-dog-dog) than trials preceded by an unrelated word (e.g., juice-juice-juice). Experiment 2 yielded similar results using a method in which pairs of words were presented on the …


The Language Of Sport And The Social Construction Of Gender, Katherine L. Mcdowell May 1995

The Language Of Sport And The Social Construction Of Gender, Katherine L. Mcdowell

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

Feminist scholars have argued that through the exclusion of women and the association of men with physical competence, power and even violence, the institution of sport has traditionally provided men with a homosocial sphere of life that bolsters the ideology of male superiority (Messner, Duncan, & Jensen, 121). Feminists have also argued that as the experiential and moral expression of our culture, common English vocabulary - and the language of sport in particular - powerfully reinforces, protects, and perpetuates patriarchal and sexist social order (Miller 55-56). In essence, feminists hold that if everyday language is a critical constituent of social …