Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Relational Reasoning Across Cultures: Consistency And Variation In South Korea, The United States, And China, Alexandra Carstensen, Minju Kim, Youngon Choi, Caren M. Walker

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a “relational shift,” over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task. This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, where the US and China appear at opposite ends of a continuum, focusing on objects (US) versus relations (CN). This raises the possibility that differences in culture and language may shape variation in the development of abstract reasoning. Here, we …

Bilingual Beginnings: Expressive Language And Socio-Emotional Development In Early Childhood, Molly C. Mccormick

Scripps Senior Theses

Although research on bilingualism has expanded rapidly in recent years, the majority focuses on cognitive advantages or receptive vocabulary, or the words children understand. Far less attention has been given to how expressive language, the words children produce, and its potential role as the mechanism linking bilingual exposure to socio-emotional development. Although dual-language learners sometimes appear to have relatively limited expressive vocabularies in one language, these differences tend to reflect patterns of language use and input quality rather than true developmental delays. Even so, temporary differences in expressive skills can be especially meaningful during children’s formative years, when they rely …

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 …

Sociology: Culture, Marcia Morrison

Open Educational Resources

This work examine culture. It begins by examining the foundations of culture to include norms, values, language, symbols and knowledge. In looking at each, it breaks down the implication of each to the development of ourselves as well as the person in the environment. It moves on to look at contexts of culture such as dominant cultures juxtapose to competing cultural systems, and how the various elements of culture can serve to either promote or minimize the various cultural constructs within society.

How Childhood Maltreatment Shapes Brain Regions: Considerations For Speech-Language Pathology, Alexa G. Sees

Honors Thesis

Childhood maltreatment is a pervasive issue that affects millions of children worldwide, leading to alterations in key structures such as the limbic system, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, visual cortex, and language areas. These changes result in significant cognitive, emotional, and neurological consequences, such as learning deficits, emotional regulation issues, memory problems, reduced vocabulary size, speech errors, etc. This thesis explores the neurological effects of childhood maltreatment and their implications for speech-language pathology, highlighting how maltreatment-induced brain changes affect areas within the scope of speech-language pathology, such as social communication, language development, and behavior management. These results underscore the importance of …

Examining Gender Differences In Heritage Language Maintenance And Loss Among South Asian First-Generation Canadians, And The Effect On Well-Being, Amreen Sangha

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Language is prevalent in various aspects of life. Not only is it often essential for communication, but it also has deep roots within cultural contexts. Specifically, within South Asian culture knowing one’s heritage language is considered to be necessary when it comes to connecting with one's cultural group and identity. Heritage language maintenance can be seen differently within different individuals and have different implications for them. This study was designed to explore gender differences in heritage language loss as well as the role language may play in one’s well-being. Canadian-born South Asian children and young adults aged 10-25 completed an …

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 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 …

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 …

Stimming Expresses Empathy, Not To Be Masked Or Persecuted: A Scoping Review And Case Study Of The “Double-Empathy Problem” Solved By Recognizing The Autism Language, Kathryn Haas

Student Capstone Papers

This article critically examines autism and autistic stimming through the lenses of neurotypicals and autistics, evaluates confines currently imposed upon autistics by neurotypical society, and synthesizes what autistic leaders have expressed about their experiences striving for inclusion (Gernsbacher, 2017; Milton, 2012). Autistic-led studies are now at the forefront of the neurodiversity movement and are growing in fervor. The following themes were identified: (a) prevalence of autism, (b) the interpretation and measurement of empathy, (c) discovery of genetic factors transformed autistics’ identity, (d) publication of non-genetic factors such as vaccines undermined the legitimacy of the autism language, (e) the problem with …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

Investigating The Effects Of Copy Number Variants On Reading And Language Performance, Alessandro Gialluisi, Alessia Visconti, Erik G. Willcutt, Shelley D. Smith, Bruce F. Pennington, Mario Falchi, John C. Defries, Richard K. Olson, Clyde Francks, Simon E. Fisher

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Background

Reading and language skills have overlapping genetic bases, most of which are still unknown. Part of the missing heritability may be caused by copy number variants (CNVs).

Methods

In a dataset of children recruited for a history of reading disability (RD, also known as dyslexia) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their siblings, we investigated the effects of CNVs on reading and language performance. First, we called CNVs with PennCNV using signal intensity data from Illumina OmniExpress arrays (~723,000 probes). Then, we computed the correlation between measures of CNV genomic burden and the first principal component (PC) score …

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 …

Examining The Complex Relationships Of Early Intervention On Language And Psychosocial Development In Families Facing Multiple Risks With A Focus On Children Of Hispanic Immigrants, Marina Marie Mendoza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abundant research has shown that poverty has negative influences on young child academic and psychosocial development, and unfortunately, disparities in school readiness between low and high income children can be seen as early the first year of life. The largest federal early care and education intervention for these vulnerable children is Early Head Start (EHS). To diminish these disparate child outcomes, EHS seeks to provide community based flexible programming for infants and toddlers and their families. Given how relatively recent these programs have been offered, little is known about the nuances of how EHS impacts infant and toddler language and …