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. 

Currently I am working on three projects: 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 " and 2 projects with Prof. Nitya Sethurmanan (University of Michigan Dearborn and Prof. Madhavilatha Maganti, Krea University, Chenai, India) : "The judgments on early-learned verbs and body parts in Telugu and Hindi speaking children from 5 to 8 years" and "Associations and Judgements of Body Parts and Early Learned Verbs: Comparison between Older and Younger Tamil-English Bilingual Adults".

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