Alexandra Frazer
Education
- Ph.D., psychology, Lehigh University
- M.A., psychology, Northern Arizona University
- B.A., psychology, Northern Arizona University
Teaching Interests
I am mainly interested in teaching courses related to methodology and statistics and in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. At Muhlenberg, I teach a variety of courses about research methodology and cognition, but I also teach the training course for new learning assistants, Adult Personal and Cognitive Development. Teaching that course is particularly fun because it covers how we learn and how we can use what we know about learning to improve teaching and classroom experiences. I get the opportunity to take a lot of the discussion with students from this class and apply it directly to my other classes.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
My research interests include psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, the representation of conceptual knowledge, memory, attention and language use in society and by the media.
I am currently pursuing three questions related to language production:
First, I am interested in how recent use of certain grammatical structures influences later use of those same structures and alternatives (e.g. active/passive alternation). I am also interested in how the availability of to-be-spoken words influences structural selection.
Second, I am researching word form production by considering which components of words are the functional units of phonological encoding. Participants are given a group of words that share the initial sounds (e.g. bake beach, bore, boot) and asked to iteratively name them. The degree of relatedness in sounds is varied and we compare how easily participants can access those words compared to ones that do not share a relationship. My lab is currently also looking at whether profanity is prepared to be spoken in the same way as non-taboo language using this paradigm.
Third, I am also studying the combined effects of phonological form preparation, a facilitatory attentional process (described above) and semantic interference, which involves unconscious adaptation in memory, using blocked cyclic picture naming to understand how both sound and meaning contribute independently to word production.
My previous work has been on sentence structure selection when writers describe interpersonal and sexual violence, which I am interested in expanding into an analysis of social media content.
- CUE: Senior Thesis I
- CUE: Senior Thesis II
- Neuroscience Independent Study/Research: Examining Non-Semantic C
- Neuroscience Independent Study/Research: Semantic Inferences
- Psychological Statistics
- Psychology Independent Study/Research: Hopecore: An Exploratio
- Psychology Independent Study/Research: Impact of Hopecore
- Psychology Independent Study/Research: Language Research
- Psychology of Language
- Sensation & Perception
Recent Presentations (* indicates undergraduate collaborator)
- Hodges, K.*, Frazer, A.K., Huot, A.*, Abdelel, H.*, & Oxer, J.* (2019). Prepare to swear: Phonological preparation of swear words. Poster presented at the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Montreal, Canada.
- Herr, T.* & Frazer, A.K. (November, 2018). The popularity contest of twitter: How decisions on interacting with tweets are made. Poster presented at the 59th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans, LA, USA.
- Frazer, A.K. & Huot, A.* (March, 2018). Form preparation of easy-to-recall word pairs using the associates task. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Philadelphia, PA.
- Frazer, A.K. (January, 2018). Using ‘No-Risk’ Quiz Assessment in Psychological Statistics. Poster presented at the annual meeting of NITOP, St. Pete’s Beach, FL.
- Butler, L.*. “The Effect of Cue Type on Language Switching Costs in Bilinguals,” poster presented at the 4th annual GSOLT: Language, Linguistics, and Life Conference, Philadelphia, PA, USA. (Dana Scholars Program - Research Project) (April, 2017).
- Frazer, A.K., (2016). Lexical and syntactic influences on structural selection in language production (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Lehigh Preserve/ProQuest. 2593. https://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd/2593/
- Frazer, A.K. and O’Seaghdha, P.G. Changing Expectations in Preparation of Word Beginnings, poster presented at the 57th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA, USA. (November, 2016).
- Frazer, A.K., & O’Seaghdha, P.G. Cumulative and Immediate Priming in Sentence Production, poster presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL, USA. (November, 2015).
- Frazer, A.K., O’Seaghdha, P.G., and Rehrig, G.*. “Structural Variation Does Not Prevent Form Preparation in Word Production: Support for an Attentional Account,” poster presented at the 55th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA, USA. (November, 2014).
- Frazer, A.K., O’Seaghdha, P.G., Munoz-Avila, H., & Roessler, N.* (2014). Competitor activation and semantic interference: Evidence from combined phonological and semantic similarity. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp.1108-1113). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/197/paper197.pdf
- O’Seaghdha, P.G. & Frazer, A.K. (2014). The exception does not rule: Attention constrains form preparation in word production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(3), 797-810. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0035576
- Preusse, K.*, Frazer, A.K., and O’Seaghdha, P.G. Semantic Interference in Word Production: Insights from Remote Associates in Problem Solving, poster presented at the 54th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (November, 2013).
- Preusse, K.*, Lewis, J.*, Prieto, C.*, Frazer, A.K. and O’Seaghdha, P.G. Exploring Phonological Preparation and Semantic Interference in Word Production, poster presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, New York, NY. (March, 2013).
- O’Seaghdha, P.G., Packer, D., Frazer, A.K., Preusse, K.* Hatalis, K., Munoz-Avila, H., & Hupbach, A., Does Mere Co-activation Drive Semantic Interference?, paper presented at the 54th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (November, 2013).
- Frazer, A.K. & O’Seaghdha, P.G., Does Phrase Structure Priming Exist? poster presented at the 7th International Workshop on Language Production, New York City, NY, USA. (July, 2012).
- O’Seaghdha, P.G. & Frazer, A.K. A Goal-setting Theory of Preparation for Word Production, paper presented at the 52nd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Seattle, WA, USA. (November, 2011).
- Frazer, A.K. & O’Seaghdha, P.G. (2011). Phrase structure priming across sentences: Facilitation or reconfiguration? In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1140-1145). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2011/papers/0269/paper0269.pdf Frazer, A.K. & O’Seaghdha, P.G. Flexible Planning in Word Production., poster presented at the 51st annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. (November, 2010).
- Frazer, A.K. & Miller, M.D. (2009). Double standards in sentence structure: Passive voice in narratives describing domestic violence. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 28(1), 62-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X08325883
- Frazer, A.K., Knicely, J.L., & O’Seaghdha, P. G. Expect the Unexpected: Robust Planning Processes in Speech Production, poster presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Amsterdam, Netherlands. (July, 2009).
- Frazer, A.K. & Miller, M.D. ”Gender of Attacker and Victim Affects Sentence Structure in Descriptions of Interpersonal Violence,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Denver, CO, USA. (April, 2007).
- Frazer, A.K.* & Miller, M.D. Male-on-Female Versus Female-on-Male Violence: Gender and Verb Voice in Newspaper Stories, poster presented at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Phoenix, AZ. (April, 2005).
Psychology
Contact: alexandrafrazer@muhlenberg.edu