Psychology

Developmental Psychology

Language Development

PSY 301 - Child Development
PSY 305 - Infancy and Early Childhood Development

Dr. Maouene obtained her BA in Social Sciences (1984, 1986) and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2002). She was an associate researcher in the cognitive development lab of Dr. Linda Smith, Bloomington, IN, USA from 2003-2009. Her teaching experience is in child development and research methods and her research focuses on early English verb and noun semantics and their relation to the perceptual and motor systems. She uses associations, corpora, networks, and in collaboration fmri techniques. She is currently collaborating to establish crosslinguistic data about body parts and early verbs in Hebrew, Japanese, Hindi, Dakkini Urdu, Tamil and Telugu (languages of the South of India), both in children and adults.

My research focuses on how conceptual knowledge is being reorganized from childhood through adulthood. I  specifically examine how verb meaning emerges from structured regularities in the linguistic and embodied contexts that language foregrounds. I employing methodologies such as semantic network analysis of child-directed speech, behavioral word association tasks, and cross-linguistic comparisons, and , in collaboration, fMRI techniques. I am currently collaborating to expand that perspective to languages such as Hebrew, Japanese, Hindi, Telugu and Tamil/English bilinguals. We ask questions such as: Do speakers of Tamil consistently relate early-learned verbs with specific body parts? What are the similarities and differences between their association in Tamil vs in English. What other social communication systems do the speakers rely on (e.g., gestures)? How do younger adults compare to older adults and what are the contexts evoked by their multiple associative responses?

Maouene, Josita, Sethuraman, Nitya, Uziel-Karl, Sigal and Hidaka, Shohei. "The associative system of early-learned Hebrew verbs and body parts: a comparative study with American English" Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 34, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-34. 

Boyer, T. W., Maouene, J., & Sethuraman, N. (2017). Attention to Body Parts Varies with Visual Preference and Verb-Effector Associations. Cognitive Processing, 18(2), 195-203.

Brooks, P., Maouene, J., Sailor, K. & Seiler-Gardner, L. Modeling the semantic networks of school-age children with specific language impairment and their typical peers. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Child Development, BUCLD 41 Proceedings, Cascadilla Press, 2017.

Maouene, J. C., Sethuraman, N., Maouene, M. M., & Otieno, S. (2016). Contingencies between Verbs, Body Parts, and Argument Structures in Maternal and Child Speech: A Corpus Study. Language and Cognition, 8(2), 237-282.