Josita Maouene
Associate Professor - Developmental Psycholinguistics
- B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Office: 2213 Au Sable Hall
Phone: (616) 331-3369
Email: [email protected]
Lab: Language Lab (Lal); 301 W. Fulton Street; 104 Eberhard Center
Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Josita-Maouene
Specialization
Developmental Psychology
Language Development
Courses Taught
PSY 301 - Child Development
PSY 305 - Infancy and Early Childhood Development
Research Interests
Dr. Maouene obtained her BA and MA 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, Urdu, Dakkini and Telugu (language of the South of India), both in children and adults.
Current Research
Currently I am working on a collaborative project with CUNY, Prof. Patricia Brooks and colleagues, on "Lexical-Semantic Networks of School-age Children with and without Language Impairment Using Repeated Word Associations ".
Representative Publications
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. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2022-0038
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 doi:10017/s10339-017-0792-y
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. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2014.48