Department of psychology

About the DepartmentDepartment Resources For Our Alumni & Friends Participate in Research

William E. Merriman, Ph.D.

Education: Ph.D., University of Minnesota (1984)

Research Interests

My research focuses on children’s language, memory, and thought, with an emphasis on word learning and metacognition in early childhood. Some current lines of research concern:

• Awareness of Gaps in Linguistic Knowledge -- What procedure does a young child use to decide that some word is unknown, that some object cannot be named, or that some utterance cannot be interpreted clearly?  How is the accuracy of these decisions related to the efficiency of various cognitive processes?
• Overconfidence in Memory – Why do young children make such unrealistically optimistic predictions about their memory performance?  Why do they become less optimistic as they get older?
• Verb Retrieval – Why do young children find it more difficulty to retrieve a result verb (e.g., open) than a manner verb (e.g., kick) when talking about other people’s actions, but not when talking about their own?

See Dr. Merriman’s vita.

Courses Frequently Taught

• Quantitative Methods in Psychology I (undergraduate)
• Child Psychology (undergraduate)
• Cognitive Development (graduate)
• Metacognition (graduate)

Recent Publications

Lipko, A. R.*, Dunlosky, J., & Merriman, W. E. (in press). Persistent overconfidence despite practice: The role of task experience in preschoolers' recall predictions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Merriman, W. E., & Lipko, A. R.* (2008). A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 1012-1031.

Merriman, W. E., Lipko, A. R.*, & Evey, J. A.** (2008). How children learn to judge whether a word is one they know: A dual criterion account. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108, 83-98.

Merriman, W. E., Evey, J. A. ** (2005). The nominal passover effect depends on addressee age, speaker goal, and object similarity. Child Development, 76, 1185-1201.
 

Marazita, J. M.**, & Merriman, W. E. (2004).  Young children’s judgment of whether they know names for objects: The metalinguistic ability it reflects and the processes it involves. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 458-472.

* Recent graduate advisee    ** Former graduate advisee