Melodies and Meaning: Can Children's Music Implicitly Induce a Context?

Presentation Type

Poster

Conference Date

Spring 4-17-2026

Abstract

Semantic control facilitates context-relevant knowledge retrieval. Prior work indicates that participants who complete a word association task while imagining their responses will be provided to a toddler generate more frequent words with lower age of acquisition and fewer letters than participants instructed to imagine interacting with a peer or to generate only short associated words. While consistent with the “warping” of long-term semantic memory to adapt the default semantic space to a familiar context, explicit instructions may cause participants to discover child-oriented responses via iterative retrieval and evaluation. The current study examines how implicitly induced contexts influence responses throughout a standard word association task by exposing participants to instrumental children’s music rather than delivering instructions. Baseline performance was established by exposing additional participants to either classical music or white noise. Preliminary results showed that responses generated in the child-oriented context are trending towards lower age of acquisition and fewer letters than those from the white noise context. However, data collection is ongoing, and data cleaning may reveal significant differences in age of acquisition, word frequency, and word length between contexts. Replicating prior work via implicit context induction would provide novel evidence that semantic control can warp long-term memory representations.

Presenter

Marissa Goldthorp

Faculty Mentor

Christopher Cox

Award

2nd Place, Poster Presentations - Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts; 2nd Place, LSU College of Humanities & Social Sciences

Academic Major

Psychology

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