We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…

When spoken language (unimodal) bilinguals switch between languages, they must simultaneously inhibit 1 language and activate the other language. Because American Sign Language (ASL)-English (bimodal) bilinguals can switch into and out of code-blends (simultaneous production of a sign and a word), we can tease apart the cost of inhibition (turning…

Parents are typically in charge of purchasing the food that their children eat, but little is known about how parents decide if particular foods are healthy for their children and how their beliefs about nutrition influence their children's beliefs. In two studies, we investigated how parents of children ages 4 to 12 (N = 826) make decisions about…

Modern social intelligence includes the ability to watch videos and answer questions about social and theory-of-mind-related content, e.g., for a scene in "Harry Potter," "Is the father really upset about the boys flying the car?" Social visual question answering (social VQA) is emerging as a valuable methodology for studying…

While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and…

A multiple probe design across behaviors replicated across participants was used to examine the effects of a simultaneous prompting procedure delivered along with instructive feedback and observational learning stimuli when teaching academic skills to a small group of students with ASD. Different target skills were taught to each student in the…

Various tactile methods, such as Braille, have been employed to enhance the recognition ability of chemical structures by individuals with visual disabilities. However, it is unknown whether reading aloud the names of chemical compounds would be effective in this regard. There are no systems currently available using an audio component to assist…

Graphics presented alongside expository science texts can have a number of positive effects for instruction, including facilitating engagement, arousing interest, and improving understanding. However, because students harbor expectations about which contexts are likely to support better understanding, the mere presence of graphics also has the…

The aim of this study was to examine whether the valence and origin of emotional words can alter perception of ambiguous objects in terms of warmth versus competence, fundamental dimensions of social cognition. 60 individuals were invited into the study focusing on the limits of intuition. They were asked to try to guess the meaning of Japanese…

Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is an intensively studied single-trial learning paradigm whereby animals are trained to avoid a taste that has been paired with malaise. Many factors influence the strength of aversion learning; prominently studied among these is taste novelty--the fact that preexposure to the taste conditioned stimulus (CS)…

Two visual world experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with "some" using a "gumball paradigm." On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with orange and blue gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs dropped to the lower chamber, creating a contrast…

Research Findings: Although work across developmental and educational psychology reveals that trust impacts children's acceptance of claims and that teacher-student relationships impact learning outcomes, little work has integrated these literatures to better understand how students' trust in their teacher facilitates learning. In the present…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

Purpose: Visual attention is essential in many areas ranging from everyday life situations to the workplace. Different circumstances such as driving in traffic or participating in sports require immediate adaptation to constantly changing situations and frequently the conscious perception of 2 objects or scenes at the same time. Method: The…