No description available.

This study tested a mediated-moderator model that was developed to explore whether age of entry into a Head Start Program moderated the relationship between maternal depressive symptomology and child cognitive and social outcome. In addition, the mediating role of maternal social support was examined. The study sample included 43 low-income mothers and their pre-school aged children who were enrolled in a large Head Start program in Southwest Virginia. Maternal depressive symptomology was measured using the CES-D and perceived social support was measured using the Perceived Social Support Scale (PSS). Child cognitive data included scores on two working memory tasks and the PPVT. Child social outcomes were assessed using the Social Skills Scale and the Classroom Conduct Scale developed for use with Head Start Populations. Results of the study did not support a moderating role for age of entry to Head Start. Level of maternal education was found to predict both child working memory skill and receptive language ability, and high levels of maternal depressive symptomology were found to predict child social skills. In addition, exploratory analyses were conducted to examine gender differences in the relations between variables when girls and boys were analyzed separately. A significant interaction effect was found for gender and maternal education in predicting preschool receptive language ability. Preliminary data suggests that boys may be more highly impacted by maternal factors than are girls. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this position paper is to propose a comprehensive theoretical model of what can and does occur in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to extend thinking, learning and construction of meaning within a shared reading activity setting, including the development and emergence of language, literacy and social skills. By incorporating Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective, Jean Piaget's dialectical learning, and the concepts of metacognition, mindfulness, and mind-mindedness, a model depicting the dynamics of a shared reading activity is proposed. Implications for research and practice are discussed, including suggestions for future research and ways to foster effective teaching practices. / Master of Science

Recent research suggests that visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) taps a crossmodal associative learning mechanism involved in reading acquisition. However, evidence from children with dyslexia indicates that deficits in visual-verbal PAL are strongly linked to the verbal demands of the task. The research presented in this thesis had two overarching aims: first, to dissociate crossmodal and verbal demands in driving the PAL-reading relationship, and second, to assess the hypothesis that visual-verbal PAL plays a causal role in reading development. To address the first aim, a series of experiments examined the relationship between reading ability and PAL tasks differing in modality (crossmodal, unimodal) and output demand (visual, verbal). The results supported a verbal account of the PAL-reading relationship. In typically developing children and children with dyslexia, only tasks with a verbal output demand (i.e., visual-verbal PAL, verbal-verbal PAL) demonstrated a relationship with reading ability. In children with dyslexia, poor performance was isolated to difficulties learning novel phonological forms, rather than difficulties specific to crossmodal associative learning. Furthermore, the ability to learn novel phonological forms was found to fully explain visual-verbal PAL performance across reading abilities. In a final experiment, the causal role of visual-verbal PAL in reading development was assessed. The results of a longitudinal study from the start to the end of kindergarten showed that visual-verbal PAL measured in pre-readers did not predict reading ability at the end of kindergarten. Instead, PAL performance was influenced by learning to read.

Data are presented in seven chapters that address the reciprocal relationship between oral vocabulary and reading development. Chapter 2 explores exception word reading in poor comprehenders longitudinally, finding deficits that are pervasive over a period of two years. The results support the hypothesis that weak oral vocabulary skills are causally related to poor exception word reading in this group. In Chapter 3, orthographic and semantic skills in poor comprehenders are investigated in a word learning paradigm. This chapter provides evidence that poor comprehenders have more difficulty learning and retaining semantic information than orthographic information. A similar paradigm is described in Chapter 4 to investigate predictors of orthographic and semantic learning. In a large group of typically developing readers, this demonstrates that decoding is the strongest predictor of orthographic learning while existing oral vocabulary knowledge is the strongest predictor of semantic learning. In Chapters 5 and 6 orthographic and semantic skills in poor comprehenders and children with dyslexia are compared using standard off-line tasks (Chapter 5) and an online word learning experiment (Chapter 6). These chapters indicate similarities as well as differences in the reading and language profiles of these groups. Chapter 7 adopts a different approach by using a word learning study to investigate the benefit of teaching new oral vocabulary in the presence of orthography.

<p>The uniquely human mathematical mind sets us apart from all other animals. Although humans typically think about number symbolically, we also possess nonverbal representations of quantity that are present at birth and shared with many other animal species. These primitive numerical representations are thought to arise from an evolutionarily ancient system termed the Approximate Number System (ANS). The present dissertation aims to determine how these preverbal representations of quantity may serve as the foundation for more complex quantitative reasoning abilities. To this end, the five studies contained herein investigate the relations between representations of number, representations of other magnitude dimensions, and symbolic math proficiency in infants, children, and adults. The first empirical study, described in Chapter 2, investigated whether infants engage the ANS to represent the full range of natural numbers. The study presented in Chapter 3 compared infants' acuity for detecting changes in contour length to their acuity for detecting changes in number to assess whether representations of continuous quantities are primary to representations of number in infancy. The study presented in Chapter 4 compared individual differences in acuity for number, line length, and brightness in children and adults to determine how the relations between these magnitudes may change over development. Chapter 5 contains a longitudinal study investigating the relation between preverbal number sense in infancy and symbolic math abilities in preschool-aged children. Finally, the study presented in Chapter 6 investigated the mechanisms underlying the maturation of the number sense and determined which features of the number sense are predictive of symbolic math skill. Taken together, these findings confirm that number is a salient feature of the environment for infants and young children and suggest that approximate number representations are fundamental for the acquisition of symbolic math.</p> / Dissertation

Researchers have long argued that ritual plays a crucial role in marking social identities and binding individuals together in a system of shared actions and beliefs. The psychological processes underlying how and why ritual promotes group bonding and influences in- and out-group biases have not yet been fully elucidated. The research presented in this thesis was designed to examine the social and cognitive developmental underpinnings of conventional/ ritualistic behavior. Because learning cultural conventions is essential for participation in group behavior and for signaling group membership and commitment, I propose that conventional/ ritualistic learning is motivated by a drive to affiliate. Experiment 1 investigated the affiliative nature of ritualistic learning by examining the effects of third-party ostracism on imitation of an instrumental versus ritual action sequence and prosocial behavior. Individuals who do not participate in shared group conventions often face the threat of ostracism from the group. Given that attempting re-inclusion is an established response to ostracism, I predicted that the threat of ostracism increases affiliative motivations and thus will increase imitative fidelity, especially in the context of conventional learning. Experiment 2 examined the effects of first-person ostracism in the context of in- and out-groups on children’s imitation of a ritualistic action sequence and pro-social behavior. I predicted that the experience of ostracism by an in-group versus an out-group has important implications for the construal of social exclusion and affiliative behavior. I hypothesized that children would be motivated to re-affiliate by imitating the model and acting pro-socially towards the group, especially when ostracized by in-group members. Based on the findings of this research and insight from anthropology, and social and developmental psychology, I will present a picture of how children acquire the conventions of their group and how these conventions influence social group cognition.

Faces communicate a wealth of information, including cues to others’ internal emotional states. Face processing is often studied using static stimuli; however, in real life, faces are dynamic. The current project examines face detection and emotion recognition from isolated motion cues. Across two studies, facial motion is presented in point-light displays (PLDs), in which moving white dots against a black screen correspond to dynamic regions of the face. In Study 1, adults were asked to identify the upright facial motion of five basic emotional expressions (e.g., surprise) and five neutral non-rigid movements (e.g., yawning) versus inverted and scrambled distractors. Prior work with static stimuli finds that certain cues, including the addition of motion information, the spatial arrangement of elements, and the emotional significance of stimuli affect face detection. This study found significant effects involving each of these factors using facial PLDs. Notably, face detection was most accurate in response to face-like arrangements, and motion information was useful in response to unusual point configurations. These results suggest that similar processes underlie the processing of static face images and isolated facial motion cues. In Study 2, children and adults were asked to match PLDs of emotional expressions to their corresponding labels (e.g., match a smiling PLD with the word “happy”). Prior work with face images finds that emotion recognition improves with age, but the developmental trajectory depends critically on the emotion to be recognized. Emotion recognition in response to PLDs improved with age, and there were different trajectories across the five emotions tested. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of the influence of motion information in face processing and emotion recognition, by demonstrating that there are similarities in how people process full-featured static faces and isolated facial motion cues in PLDs (which lack features). The finding that even young children can detect emotions from isolated facial motion indicates that features are not needed for making these types of social judgments. PLD stimuli hold promise for future interventions with atypically developing populations.

Statistical learning (SL) is believed to be a mechanism that enables successful language acquisition. Language acquisition in turn is heavily influenced by environmental factors such as socioeconomic status (SES). However, it is unknown to what extent SL abilities interact with SES in affecting language outcomes. To examine this potential interaction, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 38 children aged 7-12 while performing a visual SL task consisting of a sequence of stimuli that contained covert statistical probabilities that predicted a target stimulus. Hierarchical regression results indicated that SL ability moderated the relationship between SES (average of both caregiver’s education level) and language scores (grammar, and marginally with receptive vocabulary). For children with high SL ability, SES had a weaker effect on language compared to children with low SL ability, suggesting that having good SL abilities could help ameliorate the disadvantages associated with being raised in a family with lower SES.

Living in poverty and persistent low income has detrimental impacts on many facets of the lives of parents and children. During the early years of the new millennium this was of primary concern to the Scottish and UK governments: in response, policies were implemented to improve children's developmental outcomes, and to increase both maternal employment and levels of income for low paid and unemployed families. Previous qualitative research on families living in poverty revealed that families have varying degrees of additional vulnerability depending on their levels of social assets, e.g. social support, and financial vulnerabilities, e.g. debt and financial stress. High levels of social assets appeared to attenuate, and low levels of social assets appeared to exacerbate, the negative impacts of living in poverty. These social and financial assets/vulnerabilities comprise two of the five domains of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) quantified for use in this thesis. This thesis explores what impacts, if any, social and financial assets/vulnerabilities have on children's cognitive (C) development, as measured by naming vocabulary and picture similarities, and on their social, emotional and behavioural (SEB) development as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. To achieve this aim this research uses the first five sweeps of the annually-collected longitudinal Growing up in Scotland (GUS) birth cohort study. The analysis uses the technique of factor analysis to derive the latent constructs financial and social assets/vulnerabilities, and OLS multiple regression analysis with quasi-variance to test the associations. The research employs multiple dimensions of economic disadvantage - longitudinal income poverty, material deprivation, longitudinal income poverty and material deprivation combined, and longitudinal income inequality - to explore the effects, not only between the lengths of time people have lived in poverty, but also across the income inequality spectrum, i.e. persistent low income versus persistent high income. The results of the research show that high maternal social assets and financial vulnerabilities separately are associated with higher and lower levels of child SEB development respectively, especially for children living in persistent low income. The relationship did not hold for children’s cognitive development. It also reveals that children whose mothers are experiencing additional financial stress and debt have lower CSEB scores (but not picture similarities), especially in relation to SEB development. There is also a relationship between social and financial assets/vulnerabilities: having high social assets is statistically associated with lower financial stress and debt for those living with lower incomes. This thesis argues that mothers, families and children living in poverty would benefit from policy and practice interventions that support geographical proximity of family and friends, that foster close and supportive wider family relationships, and that promote access to credit that does not lead to unmanageable debt and detrimental levels of additional financial stress. The research notes that while the SLA has been a useful theoretical framework, effectively quantified, the GUS data are limited in how effectively it can construct the SLA as it is not dedicated to its measurement.