Zenzi M. Griffin

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Texas at Austin

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where al...

Language awareness (LA)—an understanding of the communicative functions and conventions of language—could benefit monolingual children as they navigate their increasingly multilingual world. To evaluate how non-native language exposure influences English-speaking children’s understanding that different languages can convey equivalent information, 6...

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun (same gender; uninformative) or in a co...

A large body of research has provided evidence that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms are associated with broad changes in attentional processes which are in turn implicated in core facets of emotion regulation. However, prior research has primarily focused on specific task-based evaluations of attention. In the current study, we evalua...

Objective: The happy-sad task adapts the classic day-night task by incorporating two early acquired emotional concepts ("happy" and "sad") and demonstrates elevated inhibitory demands for native speakers. The task holds promise as a new executive function measure for assessing inhibitory control across the lifespan, but no studies have examined th...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate executive control in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS) via a nonspeech paradigm, wherein eye movements were monitored (i.e., antisaccade task). Processes involved in an antisaccade task include working memory, attention, and voluntary motor control, but the task primar...

Purpose Using a blocked cyclic picture-naming task, we compared accuracy and error patterns across languages for Spanish–English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method Pictured stimuli were manipulated for semantic similarity across two (Same and Mixed) category contexts. Children's productions were score...

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their languages...

This study evaluates first and second-language measurement models of latent morphosyntactic abilities for Typically-Developing (TD) and Language-Impaired (LI) Spanish-English bilingual children in order to explore the relationships between common assessment tasks and morphosyntactic ability. Identifying emerging Spanish-English bilingual children a...

Purpose Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., telephone in English and teléfono in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates (table/mesa). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method Participants included Spanish–English bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 9;11 [years;months...

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish–English bilingual children. First- ( N = 586) and third-graders ( N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information abo...

Thirty-six typically developing children (Kindergarten & 2nd grade) repeatedly named objects grouped into blocks of homogenous (penguin, elephant, snake, dog) or heterogeneous (penguin, donut, orange, shoe) semantic categories. Languages were tested with different items and in separate sessions with order counterbalanced across children. As typical...

When parents select similar sounding names for their children, do they set themselves up for more speech errors in the future? Questionnaire data from 334 respondents suggest that they do. Respondents whose names shared initial or final sounds with a sibling's reported that their parents accidentally called them by the sibling's name more often tha...

Everything you wanted to know about eye movement monitoring but were afraid to ask: This is a primer for researchers new to the use of eye-tracking and particularly those with an interest in language production. It summarizes the early history of eye movement monitoring in language production research, briefly reviews the relationship between visua...

Why is it more difficult to recall the names of celebrities and old acquaintances than other words that one seldom uses? Several factors related to the way information about people are structured and how words are produced conspire to make personal names particularly difficult to retrieve. In contrast, expressions such as descriptive nicknames, kin...

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another...

Research on adult age differences in language production has traditionally focused on either the production of single words or the properties of language samples. Older adults are more prone to word retrieval failures than are younger adults (e.g., ). Older adults also tend to produce fewer ideas per utterance and fewer left-branching syntactic str...

Language production is logically divided into three major steps: deciding what to express (conceptualization), determining how to express it (formulation), and expressing it (articulation). Although achieving goals in conversation, structuring narratives, and modulating the ebb and flow of dialogue are inherently important to understanding how peop...

When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inacc...

Sentence production requires speakers to co-ordinate the preparation of words so that they are ready for articulation when they are needed. Ageing appears to influence both the speed and likelihood of successful word retrieval. We examine how age differences in word production might influence the production of larger units of speech such as sentenc...

When describing visual scenes, speakers typically gaze at objects while preparing their names. In a study of the relation between eye movements and speech, a corpus of self-corrected speech errors was analyzed. If errors result from rushed word preparation, insufficient visual information, or failure to check prepared names against objects, speaker...

Compared to generating an utterance, comprehending one is a piece of cake. Comprehenders have information from multiple sources to draw on as they form an interpretation that is good enough for their current purposes (e.g., Clark, 1996; Ferreira, Ferraro, & Bailey, 2002). For example, in face-to-face conversation listeners have access to background...

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase t...

Speakers tend to prepare their nouns immediately before saying them, rather than preparing them further in advance. To test the limits of this last-second preparation, speakers were asked to name object pairs without pausing between names. There was not enough time to prepare the second name while articulating the first, so the speakers' delay in s...

Speakers produce words to convey meaning, but does meaning alone determine which words they say? We report three experiments that show independent semantic and phonological influences converging to determine word selection. Speakers named pictures (e.g., of a priest) following visually presented cloze sentences that primed either semantic competito...

Three experiments examined the contribution of phonological availability in selecting words as predicted by interactive activation models of word production. Homophonous words such as week and weak permitted a word's phonological form to be activated on priming trials without selection of its meaning or lemma. Recent production of a homophone faile...

Speakers produced the sentence frame The A and the B are above the C to describe three pictured objects while their eye movements were monitored. Object B or C varied in codability (the number of alternative names for it) and in the frequency of its dominant name. Codability is known to affect speed of word selection, and word frequency, speed to r...

To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eye movements of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between speakers' initial eye movements and those of observers performing a nonverbal event-comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers...

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory rep...

Structural priming reflects a tendency to generalize recently spoken or heard syntactic structures to different utterances. We propose that it is a form of implicit learning. To explore this hypothesis, we developed and tested a connectionist model of language production that incorporated mechanisms previously used to simulate implicit learning. In...

Introduction One of the premises of contemporary cognitive science is that an organism's response to a stimulus requires sensory, perceptual, and memory processes on an order of complexity unexpected from observations of simple reactions to physical stimulation. It was a touchstone of the cognitive revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s that...

Theories of language production have long been expressed as connectionist models. We outline the issues and challenges that must be addressed by connectionist models of lexical access and grammatical encoding, and review three recent models. The models illustrate the value of an interactive activation approach to lexical access in production, the n...

When using verbal stimuli, researchers usually equate words on frequency of use. However, for some ambiguous words (e.g., ball as a round object or a formal dance), frequency counts fail to distinguish how often a particular meaning is used. This study evaluates the use of ratings to estimate meaning frequency. Analyses show that ratings correlate...

Producing a word to express a meaning requires the processes of lexical selection and phonological encoding. We argue that lexical selection is influenced by contextual constraint and phonological encoding by word frequency, and we use these variables to assess the processing relations between selection and encoding. In two experiments we examined...

the TN that was learned in the above SRN. Again, priming was small and inconsistent. Analysis: Model resembled the SRNmessage model in its behavior. ( 1-1) Hidden Lexicon Message Context TN Product ion Transit ion Net work Comprehension-Production model To avoid a lexically specific context representation, we derived the context from comprehension,...

Printout. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88).