Makeba Wilbourn

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

For decades, affective scientists have examined how adults and children reason about others’ emotions. Yet, our knowledge is limited regarding how emotion reasoning is impacted by race—that is, how individuals reason about emotions displayed by people of other racial groups. In this review, we examine the developmental origins of racial biases in e...

While preschoolers consistently produce and use labels for happy and sad emotional states, labels for other emotional states (e.g., disgust) emerge much later in development. One explanation for these differences may lie in how parents first talk about these emotions with their children in infancy and toddlerhood. The current study examined parent...

Studies that have examined the role of cognitive control in the acquisition of second language vocabulary in dual language learners are rare. First and second language vocabulary, phonological awareness and cognitive control were assessed in Spanish-English dual language learners (kindergarten-4th grade; half native-English and half native-Spanish)...

The role of dual language exposure in children's cognitive development continues to be debated. The majority of the research with bilingual children in the US has been conducted with children becoming literate in only one of their languages. Dual language learners who are becoming literate in both their languages are acutely understudied. We compar...

Previous research has shown that early and late bilinguals differ in their language learning experiences and linguistic outcomes. However, evidence of differences between these bilinguals on measures of executive function (EF) has been mixed. As a result, the current study sought to (1) determine whether early and late bilinguals vary from one anot...

Young infants actively gather information about their world through visual foraging, but the dynamics of this important behavior is poorly understood, partly because developmental scientists have often equated its essential components, looking and attending. Here we describe a method for simultaneously tracking spatial attention to fixated and nonf...

In the early stages of word learning, children demonstrate considerable flexibility in the type of symbols they will accept as object labels. However, around the second year as children continue to gain more language experience, they become focused on more conventional symbols (e.g., words) as opposed to less conventional symbols (e.g., gestures)....

The relationship between language development and executive function (EF) in children is not well understood. The Lexical Stroop Sort (LSS) task is a computerized EF task created for the purpose of examining the relationship between school-aged children's oral language development and EF. To validate this new measure, a diverse sample of school-age...

The relationship between consistency of hand preference, left hemispheric specialization, and cognitive functioning was examined in an ongoing longitudinal investigation. Children were classified as consistent or inconsistent in their hand preference across 5 assessments from ages 18 to 42 months. Findings demonstrated that (a) this early classific...

Eagly’s social role theory (Eagly and Steffen 1984) was tested examining children’s gender role stereotypes via implicit information processing and memory measures. We explored whether children’s occupational stereotypes were less restrictive for females who engaged in counterstereotypic occupations (Mary-Doctor) compared to males who engaged in co...

We tested hearing 6- and 10-month-olds' ability to discriminate among three American Sign Language (ASL) parameters (location, handshape, and movement) as well as a grammatical marker (facial expression). ASL-naïve infants were habituated to a signer articulating a two-handed symmetrical sign in neutral space. During test, infants viewed novel two-...

English-learning toddlers of 21 and 22 months were taught a novel spatial word for four actions resulting in a tight-fit spatial relation, a relation that is lexically marked in Korean but not English (Choi & Bowerman, 1991). Toddlers in a control condition viewed the same tight-fit action events without the novel word. Toddlers' comprehension of t...

This study explored 14-month-old infants' ability to form novel word-spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big...