TY - JOUR A1 - Hilton, Matt A1 - Twomey, Katherine Elizabeth A1 - Westermann, Gert T1 - Taking their eye off the ball BT - how shyness affects children’s attention during word learning JF - Journal of experimental child psychology N2 - The current study tests the hypothesis that shy children’s reduced word learning is partly due to an effect of shyness on attention during object labeling. A sample of 20- and 26-month-old children (N = 32) took part in a looking-while-listening task in which they saw sets of familiar and novel objects while hearing familiar or novel labels. Overall, children increased attention to familiar objects when hearing their labels, and they divided their attention equally between the target and competitors when hearing novel labels. Critically, shyness reduced attention to the target object regardless of whether the heard label was novel or familiar. When children’s retention of the novel word–object mappings was tested after a delay, it was found that children who showed increased attention to novel objects during labeling showed better retention. Taken together, these findings suggest that shyer children perform less well than their less shy peers on measures of word learning because their attention to the target object is dampened. Thus, this work presents evidence that shyness modulates the low-level processes of visual attention that unfold during word learning. KW - Word learning KW - Shyness KW - Language development KW - Temperament KW - Individual differences KW - Referent Selection Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.01.023 SN - 0022-0965 SN - 1096-0457 VL - 183 SP - 134 EP - 145 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hilton, Matt A1 - Räling, Romy A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Elsner, Birgit T1 - Parallels in Processing Boundary Cues in Speech and Action T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Speech and action sequences are continuous streams of information that can be segmented into sub-units. In both domains, this segmentation can be facilitated by perceptual cues contained within the information stream. In speech, prosodic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary lengthening, and pitch rise) mark boundaries between words and phrases, while boundaries between actions of an action sequence can be marked by kinematic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary deceleration). The processing of prosodic boundary cues evokes an Event-related Potentials (ERP) component known as the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), and it is possible that the CPS reflects domaingeneral cognitive processes involved in segmentation, given that the CPS is also evoked by boundaries between subunits of non-speech auditory stimuli. This study further probed the domain-generality of the CPS and its underlying processes by investigating electrophysiological correlates of the processing of boundary cues in sequences of spoken verbs (auditory stimuli; Experiment 1; N = 23 adults) and actions (visual stimuli; Experiment 2; N = 23 adults). The EEG data from both experiments revealed a CPS-like broadly distributed positivity during the 250 ms prior to the onset of the post-boundary word or action, indicating similar electrophysiological correlates of boundary processing across domains, suggesting that the cognitive processes underlying speech and action segmentation might also be shared. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 579 KW - Closure Positive Shift (CPS) KW - Event-related Potentials (ERP) KW - speech segmentation KW - action segmentation KW - prosodic boundary cues KW - prosody processing KW - kinematic boundary cues KW - action processing Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-437975 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 579 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hilton, Matt A1 - Räling, Romy A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Elsner, Birgit T1 - Parallels in Processing Boundary Cues in Speech and Action JF - Frontiers in Psychology N2 - Speech and action sequences are continuous streams of information that can be segmented into sub-units. In both domains, this segmentation can be facilitated by perceptual cues contained within the information stream. In speech, prosodic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary lengthening, and pitch rise) mark boundaries between words and phrases, while boundaries between actions of an action sequence can be marked by kinematic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary deceleration). The processing of prosodic boundary cues evokes an Event-related Potentials (ERP) component known as the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), and it is possible that the CPS reflects domaingeneral cognitive processes involved in segmentation, given that the CPS is also evoked by boundaries between subunits of non-speech auditory stimuli. This study further probed the domain-generality of the CPS and its underlying processes by investigating electrophysiological correlates of the processing of boundary cues in sequences of spoken verbs (auditory stimuli; Experiment 1; N = 23 adults) and actions (visual stimuli; Experiment 2; N = 23 adults). The EEG data from both experiments revealed a CPS-like broadly distributed positivity during the 250 ms prior to the onset of the post-boundary word or action, indicating similar electrophysiological correlates of boundary processing across domains, suggesting that the cognitive processes underlying speech and action segmentation might also be shared. KW - Closure Positive Shift (CPS) KW - Event-related Potentials (ERP) KW - speech segmentation KW - action segmentation KW - prosodic boundary cues KW - prosody processing KW - kinematic boundary cues KW - action processing Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01566 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 10 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hilton, Matt A1 - Westermann, Gert T1 - word-object mappings JF - Journal of child language N2 - This study set out to examine whether shyness, an aversion to novelty and unfamiliar social situations, can affect the processes that underlie early word learning. Twenty-four-month-old children (n =32) were presented with sets of one novel and two familiar objects, and it was found that shyer children were less likely to select a novel object as the referent of a novel label. Furthermore, not-shy children then showed evidence of retaining these novel mappings, but shy children did not. These findings suggest that shy children's aversion to novelty and to the unfamiliar context can impact on their word learning. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091600057X SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 44 SP - 1394 EP - 1412 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -