Scholars@Duke
Makeba Parramore Wilbourn

Makeba Parramore Wilbourn CV

Associate Professor of the Practice of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience
makeba.wilbourn@duke.edu
Box 90086, 417 Chapel Drive, Durham, NC 27708
214 Reuben-Cooke, Durham, NC 27708
CV

Selected Publications

Happy, sad, or yucky? Parental emotion talk with infants in a book-sharing task.

Journal Article Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · March 2022 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 the ... Full text Cite

How White American Children Develop Racial Biases in Emotion Reasoning.

Journal Article Affective science · March 2022 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 o ... Full text Cite

Examining Preverbal Infants' Ability to Map Labels to Facial Configurations.

Journal Article Affective science · June 2021 Language is important for emotion perception, but very little is known about how emotion labels are learned. The current studies examine how preverbal infants map novel labels onto facial configurations. Across studies, infants were tested with a mo ... Full text Cite

The what and the how: Information-seeking pointing gestures facilitate learning labels and functions.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · February 2019 Infants' pointing gestures are clear and salient markers of their interest. As a result, they afford infants with a targeted and precise way of eliciting information from others. The current study investigated whether, similar to older children's question ... Full text Cite

Relations between vocabulary and executive functions in Spanish-english dual language learners

Journal Article Bilingualism · January 1, 2019 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 ... Full text Cite

Constructing emotion categorization: Insights from developmental psychology applied to a young adult sample.

Journal Article Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · October 2018 Previous research has found that the categorization of emotional facial expressions is influenced by a variety of factors, such as processing time, facial mimicry, emotion labels, and perceptual cues. However, past research has frequently confounded these ... Full text Cite

Cognitive control and phonological awareness in the acquisition of second language vocabulary within the Spanish-English dual immersion context

Journal Article Cognitive Development · October 1, 2018 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-Englis ... Full text Cite

Communicating to Learn: Infants' Pointing Gestures Result in Optimal Learning.

Journal Article Child development · May 2018 Infants' pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which ... Full text Cite

Developmental changes in infants' categorization of anger and disgust facial expressions.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · October 2017 For decades, scholars have examined how children first recognize emotional facial expressions. This research has found that infants younger than 10 months can discriminate negative, within-valence facial expressions in looking time tasks, and children olde ... Full text Cite

Better early or late? Examining the influence of age of exposure and language proficiency on executive function in early and late bilinguals

Journal Article Journal of Cognitive Psychology · October 3, 2014 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, ... Full text Cite

Early communicative gestures prospectively predict language development and executive function in early childhood.

Journal Article Child development · September 2014 Using an epidemiological sample (N = 1,117) and a prospective longitudinal design, this study tested the direct and indirect effects of preverbal and verbal communication (15 months to 3 years) on executive function (EF) at age 4 years. Results indicated t ... Full text Cite

The Lexical Stroop Sort (LSS) picture-word task: a computerized task for assessing the relationship between language and executive functioning in school-aged children.

Journal Article Behavior research methods · March 2012 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 ... Full text Cite

Attentional dynamics of infant visual foraging

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Science · 2012 Cite

Changing frames of reference: Language impacts cognition and memory in Indian bilinguals

Journal Article Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology · 2012 Although converging evidence suggests that bilinguals may be bicultural, questions remain about the mechanisms underlying the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. Some research shows that bilinguals possess dual cognitive frameworks, wher ... Cite

Consistency of hand-preference across the early years: long-term relationship to verbal intelligence and reading achievement in girls.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · July 2011 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 acros ... Full text Cite

Henry the nurse is a doctor too: Implicitly examining children's gender stereotypes for male and female occupational roles

Journal Article Sex Roles · May 1, 2010 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 w ... Full text Cite

Discriminating signs: perceptual precursors to acquiring a visual-gestural language.

Journal Article Infant behavior & development · February 2007 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 artic ... Full text Cite

Can English-learning toddlers acquire and generalize a novel spatial word?

Journal Article First Language · December 1, 2006 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 conditio ... Full text Cite

14-Month-old infants form novel word-spatial relation associations

Journal Article Infancy · January 1, 2004 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 habituat ... Full text Cite