Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

The Speech-To-Song Illusion Across Development And The Effects Of High-Level Expectations, Rodica R. Constantine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The typical listener can readily categorize auditory stimuli as either speech or song even though these structures share many acoustic similarities. These musical and linguistic categories may nevertheless take time to develop as children acquire language- and music-specific knowledge. In the Speech-to-Song (STS) illusion, multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance can give rise to a perceptual switch wherein the stimulus begins to sound song-like to the listener. While the STS illusion has been well-researched in adult listeners, it had yet to be investigated in children. In our study, we examined whether children experience the STS illusion by presenting participants …

Does An Impaired Sense Of Smell Make It Harder To Think About Things Like Garlic?, Ishrat N. Khan

Honors Scholar Theses

According to sensorimotor-based (also called "embodied" or "grounded") theories of semantic memory, accessing conceptual knowledge about things involves reactivating—or “simulating”—the sensory and motor experiences that we have had with them. For instance, thinking about things for which olfactory experience is dominant (e.g., garlic or a rose) would involve simulating their smell. However, evidence for olfactory simulation when thinking about "smelly” things is sparse and mixed. We tested smell-impaired (“anosmic”) and control participants (N=130 in the anosmic group and N=190 in the control group) on three tasks (1) Picture-Word Verification, (2) Semantic Property Verification, and (3) Free Recall. We predicted that …

The Joy Of Watching The Film Arrival With Whitehead And O’Donohue, Tricia Mayer

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This paper offers a discussion of the film Arrival that is situated in the perspective of philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and John O’Donohue. The themes discussed include language, communication, context, time, and reality and includes a speculative perspective that the philosophers may have contributed to interpretation of the film’s meaning. It concludes with a view of the relevance of the film in light of current technology advances in artificial intelligence and with the authors own reflection on how this film is relevant to her current research inquiry on the topic of joy

Hailey's Hearing Aids, Hailey Marie Garcia

Whittier Scholars Program

Individuals from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community are likely to experience more anxiety and depression due to defective cognitive, social, communicational, and emotional skills (Azizi et al., 2019). The word “disability” is embedded with historical negative connotations with phrases such as “deaf and dumb” because if they were deaf or mute then they were automatically labeled as inferior (Horovitz, 2007). Since the 18th century, the DHH community has been seen as incapable, even inhuman, hence the development of emotional deficiencies that bleed into one’s perception of society and their self esteem (Gallaudet, 1886).

How do you navigate a hearing world …

Mechanisms Of False Memories In Bilinguals, Bianca Valentina Gurrola

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Research on false memory in bilinguals has discovered that false memories can transfer across languages and occur at a higher rate than for within-language false memories (Marmolejo et al., 2009). However, the exact conditions that cause the stronger between-language false memory effect are not clear, nor is it clear how language proficiency influences the production of false memories. The present study had three goals. First, we tested whether the stronger between- language false memory effect relative to the within-language effect would replicate. Second, we examined whether bilinguals could integrate information across languages to form false memories by implementing a mixed-language …

Gender Bias In Story Recounting, Cecilia Garcia, Zali White, Keeley Trainer, Madison Oliver

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Gendered language permeates sections of our lives in ways that we may not realize. Previous research indicates a relationship between biases and gendered language; however, it has primarily been conducted with children as the participants rather than adults (Seitz, et al., 2020). This study aimed to investigate this and identify the relationship between gendered language and implicit bias. Passages using gendered language can alter the listener's perspective in terms of the gender identification of an otherwise unlabeled protagonist. Therefore, to explore this phenomenon, participants of this study were given an androgynous story with masculine and feminine phrases. Then, a multiplication …

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 …

Theory Of Mind Acquisition In Children Who Are Deaf: The Importance Of Early Identification And Communication Access, Kimberly A. Peters, Jessica Beer, David Pisoni, Ethan Remmell

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare Theory of Mind (ToM) acquisition in typically-hearing preschool-age children (TH), and deaf children of hearing parents (DCHP) who received a cochlear implant by 18 months of age, to determine if early access to spoken language via a cochlear implant affected ToM acquisition.

Methods: Participants included 25 children with cochlear implants ages 3.0 to 6.5 years and 25 age-matched children with TH all of whom were enrolled in preschools with typical peer models. The test battery included measures of expressive and receptive language and ToM.

Results: There were no …

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 – …

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 …

The Effects Of Language In Music On Memory, Cat Terrell

Undergraduate Theses

This thesis focused on the effect of both instrumental and vocal music on performance on cognitive tests designed to test memory in order to gain more insight into whether the presence of language in music affects memory. Four hypotheses were tested concerning the effect of music type, question type, the interaction of the two, and personal experience with music/music training on memory assessment performance. The study found no significant effect of background condition on memory assessment performance, a significant effect of question type on memory assessment performance, no significant effect of the interaction between background condition and question type on …

Storytelling Study, Samantha Irene Pepe

Honors Theses and Capstones

Expressive prosody (i.e., a manner of communication that is characterized by lively rhythm and tempo) and inexpressive prosody (i.e., monotone speech) present different environments for listening to a story during a read-aloud session. This study aims to assess whether there are visual attention differences for preschoolers in these varied prosodic environments and how this affects comprehension.

Six Of One, Une Demi-Douzaine De L’Autre: Detecting Cross-Language Code-Switching In A Continuous Narrative, Melissa Kadish

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study examined how cross-language code-switching is processed and perceived. The following experiment compared how long English-French bilinguals, English monolinguals, and English-speaking French-language-learners took to detect instances of French/English code-switching in a semantically-rich narrative. Bilinguals displayed shorter change-detection response latencies than language learners and monolinguals, but the latter two groups did not significantly differ. These results provide insight into how the observed cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may develop, and offer support for the multi-language lexical processing theory of language interference. This study also addresses potential sociocultural origins of the observed language-level differences in code-switching perception by examining …

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 …

Source Monitoring In Bilinguals, Renee Michelle Penalver

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Source memory is memory for the context in which a particular target item is learned (Parker, 1995). The source-monitoring framework is the leading model of source memory (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). It remains unknown at what level context-to-word associations are made (e.g., at the word form level or conceptual level). Three experiments examined the effects of word frequency and language proficiency on source memory, with each experiment addressing one of the different types of source monitoring identified in this framework. In Experiment 1, we examined how language proficiency and word frequency affect external source discrimination. Participants had to discriminate …

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

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 …

Exploring Animacy As A Mnemonic Dimension, Joshua Edward Vanarsdall

Open Access Dissertations

There is a great deal of evidence across cognitive science that animacy, or more generally, the features that make up what it means to be a living thing, is a foundational dimension of human cognition. In perception, animates both capture attention (Pratt, Radulescu, Guo, & Abrams, 2010) and are relatively immune to change blindness (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007). Developmental work places the animate-inanimate distinction as one of the first categories children learn (Opfer & Gelman, 2011). Work in neuroscience points toward a fundamental role for animacy in semantic memory (Caramazza & Mahon, 2003), and linguists have identified animacy as …

A Model For Attention-Driven Judgements In Type Theory With Records, Simon Dobnik, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper makes three contributions to the discussion on the applicability of Type Theory with Records (TTR) to embodied dialogue agents. First, it highlights the problem of type assignment or judgements in practical implementations which is resource intensive. Second, it presents a judgement control mechanism, which consists of grouping of types into clusters or states by their thematic relations and selection of types following two mechanisms inspired by the Load Theory of selective attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004), that addresses this problem. Third, it presents a computational framework, based on Bayesian inference, that offers a basis for …

The Relationship Between Lexical Performance And Regional Gray Matter Volumes: A Longitudinal Study Of Cognitively Healthy Elderly, Jungmoon Hyun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship among aging, performance on lexical tasks, and regional gray matter volumes over 2-7 years. A total of 137 older participants who remained cognitively normal were administered four lexical tasks at each time point: the Boston Naming Test (BNT), Vocabulary Test, Semantic- and Phonemic-Fluency task. In addition, they underwent repeated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning acquired within two months of the lexical tasks. The average interval between time points was 2.36 years (range 1.50-7.64) and the average number of time points was 2.65 times (range 2-5).

Results indicated that age differentially affects lexical task performance …

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 …

Central Auditory Processing And The Link To Reading Ability In Adults, Lisa M. Brody

Honors Scholar Theses

What makes someone a good reader? What makes someone a poor reader? The root biological marker of reading ability has yet to be determined. Many scientists agree that phonological awareness, the understanding of speech sounds, and phonological decoding are key components of reading ability (Melby-Lervag, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). In addition to this, new research suggests that the auditory system, specifically the timing of auditory processing in the brain, provides a crucial platform that supports the development of reading ability (Banai et al., 2009). This thesis provides empirical data to support the link between reading skill …

Building An Adaptive Brain Across Development: Targets For Neurorehabilitation Must Begin In Infancy, Jamie O. Edgin, Caron A. C. Clark, Esha Massand, Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Much progress has been made toward behavioral and pharmacological intervention in intellectual disability, which was once thought too difficult to treat. Down syndrome (DS) research has shown rapid advances, and clinical trials are currently underway, with more on the horizon. Here, we review the literature on the emergent profile of cognitive development in DS, emphasizing that treatment approaches must consider how some “end state” impairments, such as language deficits, may develop from early alterations in neural systems beginning in infancy. Specifically, we highlight evidence suggesting that there are pre- and early postnatal alterations in brain structure and function in DS, …

Hemispheric Specialization For Emotion Within First And Second Languages : Emotion Word Processing In Monolingual And Bilingual Speakers, Jennifer Mary Martin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Emotion representation in monolingual speakers is complex, and for bilinguals the relationship between emotion and language can be even more intriguing. The present study examined reactions to words of six types, including positive, negative, and neutral words varying in concreteness. Words and nonwords were intermixed in a lexical decision task using hemifield presentation. In Experiment 1, participants were English monolinguals and all stimuli were presented in English. In Experiment 2, participants were Spanish-English bilinguals who were presented with both English and Spanish stimuli. Results revealed a general left hemisphere advantage. Overall, reaction times for positive words were faster than for …

I Can See What You Are Saying : Auditory Labels Reduce Visual Search Times, Kit Wing Cho

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The present study explored the mechanisms underlying the self-directed speech effect, the finding that relative to silent reading of a label (e.g., “DOG”), saying it aloud reduces visual search reaction times (RTs) for locating a target picture among distractors. Experiment 1 examined whether this effect is due to a confound in the differences in the number of cues in self-directed speech (two) vs. silent reading (one) and tested whether speech, per se, is required for the effect. Self-directed speech did not reduce search RTs more than hearing only a pre-recorded auditory presentation of a label, both of which reduced RTs …

Editorial: Neural Implementation Of Expertise, Merim Bilalic, Robert Langner, Guillermo J. Campitelli, Luca Turella, Wolfgang Grodd

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

How the brain enables humans to reach an outstanding level of performance typical of expertise is of great interest to cognitive neuroscience, as demonstrated by the number and diversity of the articles in this Research Topic (RT). The RT presents a collection of 23 articles written by 80 authors on traditional expertise topics such as sport, board games, and music, but also on the expertise aspects of everyday skills, such as language and the perception of faces and objects. Just as the topics in the RT are diverse, so are the neuroimaging techniques employed and the article formats. Here we …

Testing A Structural Equation Model Of Language-Based Cognitive Fitness, Elizabeth Ann Moxley-Paquette

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The normative development of language is often taken for granted, yet problems with language development can result in stress for the individual and family. A challenge with these language development problems lies within the contemporary education system, which assumes that children have appropriate skills when they begin school. The purpose of the study was to test a theoretical model of language readiness known as language-based cognitive fitness, which includes measures associated with structural concepts of language involving receptive language, expressive language, spontaneous narrative speech, and writing fluency. The sample included children from a private school who received an extensive battery …

The Role Of World Knowledge And Episodic Memory In Scripted Narratives, Micah L. Mumper

Psychology Honors Projects

Readers recruit information from both general world knowledge and episodic memory during reading comprehension. The present experiment used eye tracking to investigate the time-course of how these two sources of memory interact. Participants read passages describing scenarios in which an actor performs a role that was either scriptually appropriate or inappropriate. Half the passages containing the inappropriate role-filler were preceded by an episodic justification for this scriptural violation. Using the same paradigm, Cook and Myers (2004) found context had an early influence on the integration of the role-filler, but world knowledge showed a later effect in the post-target region. The …

Intact Statistical Word Learning In Autism Spectrum Disorders, Jessica Mayo

Master's Theses

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have impairments in language acquisition, but the underlying mechanism of these deficits is poorly understood. Implicit learning appears potentially relevant to language development, particularly in speech segmentation, which relies on sensitivity to the transitional probabilities between speech sounds. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between implicit learning and current language abilities in school-aged children with autism (n = 17) and typical development (n = 24) using a well-studied artificial language learning task. Results suggest that the ASD and TD groups were equally able to implicitly learn transitional probabilities from a lengthy …