Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…

This qualitative case study focuses on renaming an elementary school in Tulsa, Oklahoma from a Confederate namesake (Robert E. Lee elementary) to a name reflecting Indigenous roots of the Muskogee Creek Nation (Council Oak). The renaming took place during a national movement of removing Confederate symbols and names from public places. The…

Words influence cognition well before infants know their meanings. For example, three-month-olds are more likely to form visually based categories when exemplars are paired with spoken words than with sine-wave tones, a likely precursor to learning symbolic relations between words and their referents. However, it is unclear why words have these…

The research in this dissertation consists of two parts: An active learning algorithm for hierarchical labels and an embedding-based retrieval algorithm. In the first part, we present a new approach for learning hierarchically decomposable concepts. The approach learns a high-level classifier (e.g., location vs. non-location) by separately…

This study investigated the complex relationship between false-belief (FB) understanding, structural language and pragmatic communication in typically developing children. A total of 78 Finnish children, aged from 4 to 6 years, including an equal number of boys and girls, participated in this study. In the first instance, the study explored the…

We investigated the comorbidity of low language and reading skills in 6- to 8-year-old monolingual Polish-speaking children (N = 962) using three different approaches: norming data to determine the prevalence of co-morbid difficulties, group comparisons of profiles on key cognitive-linguistic measures, and a case series analysis examining the…

Children's ability to correctly name letters is a key predictor of later reading abilities and skills, but research on letter naming from Scandinavian orthographies is scarce. The aim of this study is to explore how child- and letter-related factors (i.e., gender, child name, phonemic awareness, letter position in the alphabet and frequency, and…

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using "zed" instead of "zee"), but do they flexibly…

Background: Word retrieval skills change across the lifespan. Permanent alterations in the form of decreased accuracy or increased response time can be a consequence of both normal ageing processes or the presence of acquired and neurodegenerative disorders (e.g., aphasia and dementia). Despite the extensive literature exploring the…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

Past and current research has explored the link between the "blackness" of a person's name and socioeconomic outcomes in American society. Black-sounding names were shown to influence employment prospects, access to credit markets, and choice of housing among other opportunities. While education research had identified a relationship…

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

Color terms divide the color spectrum differently across languages. Previous studies have reported that speakers of languages that have different words for light and dark blue (e.g., Russian "siniy" and "goluboy") discriminate color chips sampled from these two linguistic categories faster than speakers of languages that use…

One of the first ways some trans youth narrate their gender is through the process of choosing a name. Trans youth's negotiation of naming is particularly complex as they juggle family affinities and independence, as well as try on new identities and build relationships with peers. In the midst of transitioning, and often while still materially…

In 3 experiments, I investigated the role of verbal behavior development in reading and spelling sight words. I evaluated effects of different interventions for reading and spelling sight words and establishing the transformation of stimulus function across word reading and spelling. In Experiment 1, I evaluated the effects of 3 interventions on…