Biomedical subjects

Patricia J Brooks

Publications and source records attributed to Patricia J Brooks.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Contributions of response set and semantic relatedness to cross-modal Stroop-like picture-word interference in children and adults.

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes development throughout childhood. To test whether semantic processes account for age-related changes in a Stroop-like picture-word interference effect, children (3- to 12-year-olds) and adults named pictures while listening to words varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the pictures and response set membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, with animal and clothing pictures, the interference effect observed in children, but not in adults, depended on the distractors' status as members of the response set. In Experiment 3, with unrelated pictures, adults, but not children, showed greater interference for trials with distractors in the response set. These results indicate developmental changes in picture-word interference involving the establishment of a response set in working memory.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues.

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions of six bisyllabic target nonwords. After exposure, the participants were given a forced choice recognition test to judge which strings had been present in the input. Experiment 1 demonstrated that English speakers used trochaic stress to isolate strings, despite being unfamiliar with Dutch phonotactics. Experiment 2 showed benefits from invariance introduced by affricates, which are typically found at onsets of final syllables in Dutch diminutives. Together, the results demonstrate that diminutives contain prosodic and distributional features that are beneficial for word segmentation.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Developmental change in the cross-modal Stroop effect.

E. M. Elliott, Cowan, and Valle-Inclan (1998) reported a cross-modal Stroop-like interference effect in adults when an auditory distractor (a color or noncolor word) occurred simultaneously with a color patch to be named. Response times were slower with color as opposed to noncolor distractors. To distinguish two accounts of this phenomenon, we tested 4- to 11-year-olds and adults. The suppression hypothesis posits that the irrelevant word enters a phonological buffer and is injurious to color naming if the participant is unable to suppress its representation in time. The concurrent processing hypothesis states that interference occurs when the distractor and the color name are lexically accessed at the same time. Our finding that the cross-modal Stroop effect occurred in young children even with a distractor presented 500 msec in advance of the color patch favors the suppression account. Development in executive functioning may also contribute to the interference effect's becoming progressively weaker with age.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Diminutivization supports gender acquisition in Russian children.

Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2;9-4;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as simplex (e.g. jozh 'porcupine') and half as diminutive forms (e.g. jozhik 'porcupine-DIM'). Children produced fewer agreement errors for diminutive than for simplex nouns, indicating that the regularizing features of diminutives enhance gender categorization. The study demonstrates how features of child-directed speech can facilitate language learning.

Child Language↗

PubMed2002

Does preemption help children learn verb transitivity?

Children's acquisition of the transitivity status of novel verbs was examined to test whether preemption helps children learn to avoid nonconventional uses of verbs. Given that many English verbs alternate between transitive and intransitive usage (e.g., break, roll), how do children learn the fixed transitive status of verbs such as hit or the fixed intransitive status of verbs such as fall? 48 four-year-olds and 48 six- and seven-year-olds learned two novel verbs, with one verb modelled as transitive and the other as intransitive. Exposure conditions varied the occurrence and type of preemptive evidence potentially facilitating learning of the verbs' transitivity status. In comparison to a No Preemption group, only six- to seven-year-olds exposed to novel verbs in alternative construction (that allowed them to talk about the actions from the perspective of the agent or patient without changing the verbs' assigned transitivity) produced fewer utterances violating the verbs' fixed transitivity. The results identify limits in children's usage of indirect negative evidence in acquiring verb argument structure constructions.

Child↗