Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Jan 11, 2022
Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for e... more Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants ( M age = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) were presented. Infants' looking time to the string of words was recorded as a proxy of their listening attention. Five acoustic variables—mean fundamental frequency (F0), word duration, intensity variation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and spectral centroid—were also analyzed to account for infants' attentiveness to each emotion. Results: Infants generally preferred affective over neutral prosody, with more listening attention to the happy and sad voices. Happy sounds with breathy voice quality (low HNR) and less brightness (low spectral centroid) maintained infants' attention more. Sad speech with shorter word duration (i.e., faster speech rate), less breathiness, and more brightness gained infants' attention more than happy speech did. Infants listened less to angry than to happy and sad prosodies, and none of the acoustic variables were associated with infants' listening interests in angry voices. Neutral words with a lower F0 attracted infants' attention more than those with a higher F0. Neither age nor sex effects were observed. Conclusions: This study provides evidence for infants' sensitivity to the prosodic patterns for the basic emotion categories in spoken words and how the acoustic properties of emotional speech may guide their attention. The results point to the need to study the interplay between early socioaffective and language development.
Faculty Advisor: Maria D. SeraThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportuni... more Faculty Advisor: Maria D. SeraThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
Relational language is thought to influence mathematical skills. This study examines the associat... more Relational language is thought to influence mathematical skills. This study examines the association between relational language and number relation skills-knowledge of cardinal, ordinal, and spatial principles-among 104 U.S. kindergartners (5.9 years; 44% boys; 37% White, 25% Black, 14% Asian, 24% other) in the 2017-2018 academic year. Controlling for general verbal knowledge, executive function, and counting and number identification skills, relational language predicted later number relation skills, specifically number line estimation, β = .30. Relational language did not differentially predict number line estimation performance in children with low or high number relation skills, likely due to the restricted ranges of data within subgroups. Number relation skills, specifically number line estimation and number ordering, may be a pathway between relational language and mathematical skills.
Abstract 1. the goal of developmental cognitive psychology is to document the nature of emerging ... more Abstract 1. the goal of developmental cognitive psychology is to document the nature of emerging thought and knowledge, to explain why children seem to know some things and to think like adults in some ways but not in others, and finally to explain how immature thought becomes transformed into mature thought
Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob ... more Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob E. Anderson PART I: Mechanisms 2 Development of Neural Networks Supporting Goal-Directed Behavior 23 Elizabeth L. Johnson, Sarah E. Munro, and Silvia A. Bunge 3 Developing Cognitive Control: The Costs and Benefits of Active, Abstract Representations 55 Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham 4 The Emerging Executive: Using Dynamic Neural Fields to Understand the Development of Cognitive Control 91 John P. Spencer and Aaron T. Buss PART II: Implications 5 Stress and the Development of Executive Functions: Experiential Canalization of Brain and Behavior 145 Clancy Blair 6 Individual Differences in Child Temperament and Their Effect on Cognitive Control 181 Nathan A. Fox PART III: Interventions 7 Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit 205 Adele Diamond PART IV: Reflections 8 Development of Cognitive Control: Wher...
Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob ... more Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob E. Anderson PART I: Mechanisms 2 Development of Neural Networks Supporting Goal-Directed Behavior 23 Elizabeth L. Johnson, Sarah E. Munro, and Silvia A. Bunge 3 Developing Cognitive Control: The Costs and Benefits of Active, Abstract Representations 55 Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham 4 The Emerging Executive: Using Dynamic Neural Fields to Understand the Development of Cognitive Control 91 John P. Spencer and Aaron T. Buss PART II: Implications 5 Stress and the Development of Executive Functions: Experiential Canalization of Brain and Behavior 145 Clancy Blair 6 Individual Differences in Child Temperament and Their Effect on Cognitive Control 181 Nathan A. Fox PART III: Interventions 7 Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit 205 Adele Diamond PART IV: Reflections 8 Development of Cognitive Control: Where Are We and What s Next? 233 Maria D. Sera and Nicole Scott Author Index 247 Subject Index 261
Language is likely structuring spatial judgments, but how it achieves this is not clear. We exami... more Language is likely structuring spatial judgments, but how it achieves this is not clear. We examined the development of relative, spatial judgments across verbal and nonverbal tasks of above, below, right and left in children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. We found that the verbal ability to make above/below judgments preceded verbal right/left judgments and all nonverbal judgments. We also found that only when the labels were accessed-as opposed to only having been acquired-did children's nonverbal performance improve. Our findings further indicate that accessing the correct term was not needed for enhanced performance. The results suggest that accessing language unifies different instantiations of a relation into a single representation.
The Open Applied Linguistics Journal, Nov 26, 2008
We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical ... more We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender affects bilinguals' conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respectively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the order of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making.
Human cognition is the bedrock on which human language is built. However, within the last 10 year... more Human cognition is the bedrock on which human language is built. However, within the last 10 years, interest in the role that the development of language in turn plays on cognitive processes has been revived. This chapter takes stock of recently published evidence on the impact that language plays in cognitive development. It contains (1) a brief review of background underlying current research on language–thought relations; (2) an evaluation of the methods that are used; (3) a survey of the domains in which language effects have been shown; and finally (4) a list of the ways in which language and cognition interact in development.
We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical ... more We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender affects bilinguals' conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respectively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the order of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making.
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Jun 15, 2006
Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the si... more Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations front, behind, left, right, towards, away, above, and below by children learning ASL and English. Because ASL is a classifier language in which noun referents are placed into groups, each spatial relation also appeared with person, animal, and vehicle classifiers. Twenty-three children and adults who learned ASL before the age of 5 years and 23 native English-speaking adults and children participated. Both language groups participated in a comprehension task in which they chose which of 2 pictures depicted a signed or spoken relation. Results showed that children learning ASL acquired the constructions for spatial relations that typically involve perspective shifts and mental rotation later than constructions that do not involve these abilities and later than English-speaking children. Children learning ASL did not differ from English-speaking children in learning constructions that did not involve these abilities. Results also suggest that users of ASL initially comprehend spatial relations more accurately with person and animal classifiers than with the classifier for vehicles. The results are relevant to understanding the acquisition of spatial relations in ASL.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Mar 1, 2001
Children and adults often generalize a word to objects of the same shape. However, the shape prop... more Children and adults often generalize a word to objects of the same shape. However, the shape properties on which generalization is based are unknown. We investigated the degree to which two shape dimensions were represented categorically by children and adults when learning names for objects. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to establish the perceptual similarity of two sets of objects in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2 and 3, children (from 2;8 to 4;5 years of age) and adults participated in two tasks in which they learned a novel name for an exemplar. We then examined how often the novel name was generalized to different objects and to line drawings of the objects. In one task, participants generalized the names from memory; in a second task the exemplar was in front of the participant during generalization. Adults accepted names more often to objects that fell "within" the proposed shape boundaries than to objects that fell "across" the boundaries. Children, however, were just as likely to generalize names to novel objects that fell within as to objects that crossed the boundaries.
It is with great appreciation that we acknowledge the following reviewers who have served our res... more It is with great appreciation that we acknowledge the following reviewers who have served our research community by reviewing manuscripts for Nutrients in 2011.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Jan 11, 2022
Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for e... more Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants ( M age = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) were presented. Infants' looking time to the string of words was recorded as a proxy of their listening attention. Five acoustic variables—mean fundamental frequency (F0), word duration, intensity variation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and spectral centroid—were also analyzed to account for infants' attentiveness to each emotion. Results: Infants generally preferred affective over neutral prosody, with more listening attention to the happy and sad voices. Happy sounds with breathy voice quality (low HNR) and less brightness (low spectral centroid) maintained infants' attention more. Sad speech with shorter word duration (i.e., faster speech rate), less breathiness, and more brightness gained infants' attention more than happy speech did. Infants listened less to angry than to happy and sad prosodies, and none of the acoustic variables were associated with infants' listening interests in angry voices. Neutral words with a lower F0 attracted infants' attention more than those with a higher F0. Neither age nor sex effects were observed. Conclusions: This study provides evidence for infants' sensitivity to the prosodic patterns for the basic emotion categories in spoken words and how the acoustic properties of emotional speech may guide their attention. The results point to the need to study the interplay between early socioaffective and language development.
Faculty Advisor: Maria D. SeraThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportuni... more Faculty Advisor: Maria D. SeraThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
Relational language is thought to influence mathematical skills. This study examines the associat... more Relational language is thought to influence mathematical skills. This study examines the association between relational language and number relation skills-knowledge of cardinal, ordinal, and spatial principles-among 104 U.S. kindergartners (5.9 years; 44% boys; 37% White, 25% Black, 14% Asian, 24% other) in the 2017-2018 academic year. Controlling for general verbal knowledge, executive function, and counting and number identification skills, relational language predicted later number relation skills, specifically number line estimation, β = .30. Relational language did not differentially predict number line estimation performance in children with low or high number relation skills, likely due to the restricted ranges of data within subgroups. Number relation skills, specifically number line estimation and number ordering, may be a pathway between relational language and mathematical skills.
Abstract 1. the goal of developmental cognitive psychology is to document the nature of emerging ... more Abstract 1. the goal of developmental cognitive psychology is to document the nature of emerging thought and knowledge, to explain why children seem to know some things and to think like adults in some ways but not in others, and finally to explain how immature thought becomes transformed into mature thought
Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob ... more Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob E. Anderson PART I: Mechanisms 2 Development of Neural Networks Supporting Goal-Directed Behavior 23 Elizabeth L. Johnson, Sarah E. Munro, and Silvia A. Bunge 3 Developing Cognitive Control: The Costs and Benefits of Active, Abstract Representations 55 Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham 4 The Emerging Executive: Using Dynamic Neural Fields to Understand the Development of Cognitive Control 91 John P. Spencer and Aaron T. Buss PART II: Implications 5 Stress and the Development of Executive Functions: Experiential Canalization of Brain and Behavior 145 Clancy Blair 6 Individual Differences in Child Temperament and Their Effect on Cognitive Control 181 Nathan A. Fox PART III: Interventions 7 Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit 205 Adele Diamond PART IV: Reflections 8 Development of Cognitive Control: Wher...
Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob ... more Preface vii List of Contributors xi 1 What Is Cognitive Control? 1 Philip David Zelazo and Jacob E. Anderson PART I: Mechanisms 2 Development of Neural Networks Supporting Goal-Directed Behavior 23 Elizabeth L. Johnson, Sarah E. Munro, and Silvia A. Bunge 3 Developing Cognitive Control: The Costs and Benefits of Active, Abstract Representations 55 Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham 4 The Emerging Executive: Using Dynamic Neural Fields to Understand the Development of Cognitive Control 91 John P. Spencer and Aaron T. Buss PART II: Implications 5 Stress and the Development of Executive Functions: Experiential Canalization of Brain and Behavior 145 Clancy Blair 6 Individual Differences in Child Temperament and Their Effect on Cognitive Control 181 Nathan A. Fox PART III: Interventions 7 Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit 205 Adele Diamond PART IV: Reflections 8 Development of Cognitive Control: Where Are We and What s Next? 233 Maria D. Sera and Nicole Scott Author Index 247 Subject Index 261
Language is likely structuring spatial judgments, but how it achieves this is not clear. We exami... more Language is likely structuring spatial judgments, but how it achieves this is not clear. We examined the development of relative, spatial judgments across verbal and nonverbal tasks of above, below, right and left in children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. We found that the verbal ability to make above/below judgments preceded verbal right/left judgments and all nonverbal judgments. We also found that only when the labels were accessed-as opposed to only having been acquired-did children's nonverbal performance improve. Our findings further indicate that accessing the correct term was not needed for enhanced performance. The results suggest that accessing language unifies different instantiations of a relation into a single representation.
The Open Applied Linguistics Journal, Nov 26, 2008
We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical ... more We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender affects bilinguals' conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respectively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the order of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making.
Human cognition is the bedrock on which human language is built. However, within the last 10 year... more Human cognition is the bedrock on which human language is built. However, within the last 10 years, interest in the role that the development of language in turn plays on cognitive processes has been revived. This chapter takes stock of recently published evidence on the impact that language plays in cognitive development. It contains (1) a brief review of background underlying current research on language–thought relations; (2) an evaluation of the methods that are used; (3) a survey of the domains in which language effects have been shown; and finally (4) a list of the ways in which language and cognition interact in development.
We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical ... more We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender affects bilinguals' conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respectively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the order of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making.
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Jun 15, 2006
Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the si... more Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations front, behind, left, right, towards, away, above, and below by children learning ASL and English. Because ASL is a classifier language in which noun referents are placed into groups, each spatial relation also appeared with person, animal, and vehicle classifiers. Twenty-three children and adults who learned ASL before the age of 5 years and 23 native English-speaking adults and children participated. Both language groups participated in a comprehension task in which they chose which of 2 pictures depicted a signed or spoken relation. Results showed that children learning ASL acquired the constructions for spatial relations that typically involve perspective shifts and mental rotation later than constructions that do not involve these abilities and later than English-speaking children. Children learning ASL did not differ from English-speaking children in learning constructions that did not involve these abilities. Results also suggest that users of ASL initially comprehend spatial relations more accurately with person and animal classifiers than with the classifier for vehicles. The results are relevant to understanding the acquisition of spatial relations in ASL.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Mar 1, 2001
Children and adults often generalize a word to objects of the same shape. However, the shape prop... more Children and adults often generalize a word to objects of the same shape. However, the shape properties on which generalization is based are unknown. We investigated the degree to which two shape dimensions were represented categorically by children and adults when learning names for objects. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to establish the perceptual similarity of two sets of objects in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2 and 3, children (from 2;8 to 4;5 years of age) and adults participated in two tasks in which they learned a novel name for an exemplar. We then examined how often the novel name was generalized to different objects and to line drawings of the objects. In one task, participants generalized the names from memory; in a second task the exemplar was in front of the participant during generalization. Adults accepted names more often to objects that fell "within" the proposed shape boundaries than to objects that fell "across" the boundaries. Children, however, were just as likely to generalize names to novel objects that fell within as to objects that crossed the boundaries.
It is with great appreciation that we acknowledge the following reviewers who have served our res... more It is with great appreciation that we acknowledge the following reviewers who have served our research community by reviewing manuscripts for Nutrients in 2011.
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