PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Even one-year-olds show the so-called disambiguation effect, which is a tendency to select a novel object rather than a familiar object as the referent of a novel label. The strength of this effect increases over the preschool years. This age trend may be due in part to advances in metacognition. The accuracy of preschoolers' lexical knowledge judgment mediates the association between age and strength of the disambiguation effect. Also, their judgments about object label knowledge accounted for why most 4-year-olds, but only a few 3-year-olds could predict the solution to a new disambiguation problem before hearing the novel label (Henning & Merriman, 2019). Study 1 tested whether more preschoolers could make this kind of prediction if they were told that the labels were ones “you have never heard before.” Results supported this hypothesis, but only for the younger children. Also, children's tendency to make these predictions was positively associated with their ability to give accurate reports of whether various words or pseudowords had known meanings. Study 2, which used an online rather than face-to-face testing procedure, demonstrated that 3-year-olds only learned how to solve the original prediction problem if they received direct rather than indirect feedback. When they receive helpful cues, most 3-year-olds can solve a disambiguation problem before hearing the novel label. Thus, most 3-year-olds can form metacognitive representations of the elements of the disambiguation problem and use these to draw inferences about the reference of a label.

Committee: William Merriman (Advisor); Maria Zaragoza (Committee Member); Bradley Morris (Committee Member); Jeffrey Ciesla (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Developmental Psychology; Psychology

PHD, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

When shown a familiar and a novel object and asked to pick the referent of a novel label, even one-year-olds tend to favor the novel object (Halberda, 2003; Mervis & Bertrand, 1994). However, this so-called disambiguation effect becomes stronger as children develop through preschool age (Lewis & Frank, 2015). Advances in metacognition may play a role in this developmental trend. Preschoolers' awareness of their own lexical knowledge is associated with the strength of the disambiguation effect (Merriman & Schuster, 1991; Merriman & Bowman, 1989; Wall, Merriman, & Scofield, 2015). It is also associated with whether children can solve purely metacognitive forms of the disambiguation problem (Slocum & Merriman, 2018; Henning & Merriman, 2019). The current experiments tested the hypothesis that as the number of choices in a disambiguation problem increases, the frequency of correct response declines more sharply for children who lack awareness of lexical knowledge than for children who possessed it. The results of the first two experiments supported the main hypothesis. Two experiments also showed that awareness of lexical knowledge was associated with a more gradual increase in latency of correct solutions as number of choices increased. In Experiment 3, children's eye movements were recorded as they attempted to solve 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-choice problems. Various aspects of children's eye movements were analyzed, including the number of familiar object foils checked, the number of revisits to the target, and the proportion of looking time spent on the target object. The current experiments advance our insight into why the “awareness-of-knowledge advantage” in solving disambiguation problems tends to increase as number of choices increases.

Committee: William Merriman PhD (Advisor); Clarissa Thompson PhD (Committee Member); Jeff Ciesla PhD (Committee Member); Bradley Morris PhD (Committee Member); Sarah Rilling PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Developmental Psychology; Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2003, Speech Pathology and Audiology

Children use mutual exclusivity (ME) to facilitate word learning. When using ME, children have difficulty accepting multiple labels for each object. This study examined the relationship between receptive language and vocabulary skills of 3-year-old children and their synonym comprehension. Receptive vocabulary and language skills were assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test- III (PPVT-III) and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool (CELF-Pre). Synonym scores were moderately correlated to both the PPVT-III and the CELF-Pre. Furthermore, subjects who performed well on the PPVT-III scored significantly higher on the synonym test than the subjects who did not score well. The results suggested that children with strong language comprehension skills also tend to understand common synonyms, thereby suppressing the use of ME.

Committee: Fofi Constantinidou (Advisor) Subjects: Speech Communication