This study aims to investigate whether parental sensitivity is related to the level of correspondence within parent-child dyads in terms of the strategies that they use while monitoring animations...Show moreThis study aims to investigate whether parental sensitivity is related to the level of correspondence within parent-child dyads in terms of the strategies that they use while monitoring animations of social interactions. Higher levels of synchrony, or the level of correspondence in behavior between parents and their children, is related to better social and emotional developmental outcomes for the children. In total, 69 parents and their 12-months-old baby’s participated in an eye-tracking study, in which an animation was shown that depicted a situation, wherein a “baby figure” shows distress after it is separated from a “parent figure”. This so-called separation segment of the animation was followed by the so-called response segment, wherein either a reunion or further separation of the two characters was shown. Both the parental sensitivity during free-play and the relative fixation duration to the “parent figure” in regards to the “baby figure” were measured. Within this study, no relationship between parental sensitivity and the level of correspondence in monitoring strategies has been found. Moreover, there was no proof for the statement that overall the monitoring strategies of parents and their children correspond with each other while watching animations that depict a social interaction. The baby’s tend to look more at the “parent figure” than their parents do. The focus on the “parent figure” increased from the separation segment to the response segment, for both the parents and their baby’s, although this increase in fixation is bigger for the parents than for their baby’s. These results imply that further research into the possible precursors or influences on the correspondence of behaviors within parent-child dyads is necessary.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
2024-01-31T00:00:00Z
The existence of a bilingual advantage in cognitive processing is a popular research topic and is heavily debated. A seminal study by Kovács and Mehler (2009) provided evidence that there is a...Show moreThe existence of a bilingual advantage in cognitive processing is a popular research topic and is heavily debated. A seminal study by Kovács and Mehler (2009) provided evidence that there is a bilingual advantage in 7-month-old pre-verbal infants in a switching task, although replication findings are inconsistent (Dal Ben et al., 2022; D’Souza et al., 2020; Kalashnikova et al., 2021; Spit et al., 2023). Measuring the pupil dilation response (PDR), a physiological measurement linked to the locus coeruleus (LC) and as such, to cognitive processing load, could give us a more direct look into whether 7-month-old bilingual infants indeed have a cognitive advantage compared to monolinguals. For this pilot study, additional pupil size measurements were taken in the Leiden arm of the replication effort of Spit et al. (2023) to examine whether bilinguals have a smaller PDR from baseline. After hearing a syllable pattern (AAB or ABB) the infants had to predict on which side a visual reward appeared. The reward side would be the same for the first nine trials in the pre-switch block. The next nine trials had the other syllable pattern and the reward on the other side in the post-switch block. Finally, the last 18 trials mixed both syllable patterns, retaining their associated reward side. The results suggest no difference in cognitive load between the monolingual and bilingual groups when they needed to relearn to predict the target reward side in the post-switch block, nor was there a difference in mean PDR in the association block. This is in line with the results found in Spit et al. (2023) where anticipatory looking behaviour was examined. However, an exploratory analysis suggested there was a significantly larger PDR in monolinguals during stimulus presentation in the pre-switch block compared to the post-switch block, indicating monolinguals had a higher processing load in the first block of the experiment. The implications of this are unclear, but might be explained by an effect related to the unfamiliarity of the task stimuli seen in monolinguals only due to different attentional strategies between the groups. Future research should be done with larger sample sizes and more sophisticated statistical modelling.Show less
This thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric...Show moreThis thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric Specialization for Lexical Pitch–Accent in Japanese Infants' (2010). Sato et al. found that Japanese infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in Japanese disyllabic words, and that they start processing these stimuli mostly in the left hemisphere (rather than bilaterally) as they get older in their first year of life, suggesting that Japanese infants perceive lexical pitch-accent as a lexical acoustic cue. Since Dutch does not use pitch-accent as a lexical cue, we would not expect Dutch infants to start processing tonal patterns in the left hemisphere as they get older within their first year. The first step to examining this expectation is carrying out a behavioural discrimination task to establish whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords in the first place. Only then does it become fruitful to carry out a NIRS experiment like Sato et al. to investigate in what parts of the brain Dutch infants process lexical tonal patterns, and whether this differs as they get older. We found that Dutch infants do seem to be able to distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. Though the sample size of this pilot is small, the effect that we found is of such significance that we expect to find it in the larger sample size of the official study as well, showing that Dutch infants can distinguish words on the basis of their tonal pattern. We therefore expect that performing a NIRS study like Sato et al. (2010) will be feasible.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
closed access
This thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like...Show moreThis thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like patterns (i.e., ABA or ABB patterns) in linguistic input, Saffran et al. (2007) showed that infants can also learn rules from visual input. This thesis aims to investigate whether visual rule learning is still connected to language in the form of lexical knowledge, as rule learning could be facilitated by familiarity with the label pertaining to a visual object. To explore this notion, Saffran et al. (2007) is replicated with 12- to 14-month-old infants, using socks with different colour schemes as the stimuli, since the word sock should be familiar to the participants. Furthermore, the role of within-stimulus variety between A and B items is explored by comparing the results from the current study to Van Leeuwen (2016), who used entirely different objects as A and B items in a similar experiment.Show less
In this research we looked at whether infants (12- to 14-month-old) can succesfully use their lexical knowledge to aid them in acquiring an abstract grammatical rule about visually presented...Show moreIn this research we looked at whether infants (12- to 14-month-old) can succesfully use their lexical knowledge to aid them in acquiring an abstract grammatical rule about visually presented grammars. The infants in the known condition were unable to generalize this grammatical rule. However, there was learning in the nonsense condition.Show less
