Judith Becker Bryant
Judith Becker Bryant
Area Director, Program in Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology
Contact
Office: PCD 4152
Phone: 813/974-0475
Email:
Links
Bio
Dr. Judith Becker Bryant is Professor of Psychology and Area Director for the Doctoral Program in Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology. Bryant graduated from Yale University and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development in child psychology. Her research focuses on language development. She is best known for her work on pragmatic socialization and lexical innovation in the preschool years. Recently she has conducted research on gender and age differences in expressions of affection. Bryant has received numerous teaching awards and particularly enjoys teaching developmental psychology and developmental research methods.
Teaching
Ph.D. Areas: Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology
Research
Language Development, Pragmatics, Language and Social Competence, Language and Affection.
Current Work
Most recently I have been studying age and gender differences in children’s verbal expressions of affection. Girls, but not boys, begin to mask or mitigate expressions of anger in early childhood, but the possibility that boys mitigate expressions of positive emotion has not yet been investigated in either the language development or emotional development literatures.
My students and I have been conducting experiments in which 5-10-year-old children participate in structured interviews about how they would sign birthday cards to a teacher, same and opposite sex friends, and a relative, and why they would sign in those ways. They are also asked how they would interpret different closings (e.g., “from,” “love,” name only) for birthday cards received from those individuals. Both age and gender differences emerge in children’s explanations of decisions about signing cards “love.” Among other interesting findings, older boys tend to express reservations about writing “love” to same-sex friends. We are considering these findings in conjunction with those from Ganie DeHart’s (SUNY Geneseo) semi-naturalistic study of 4- and 7-year-olds playing with siblings and peers. We have also been collecting actual birthday cards to complement our experimental data. Our findings contribute to our understanding of gender socialization, the development of relationships and emotion, and the role of language in these processes
Earlier Work
I am best known for my research on pragmatic socialization and lexical innovation. I have also collaborated on applied research with colleagues in Communication Sciences and Disorders (Elaine Silliman and Ruth Bahr). We explored language-related factors that predict the success of Spanish-speaking children in acquiring English literacy skills. The two factors of greatest interest to us were phonological sensitivity and inferencing skills.
Current Courses