Bernardo Alvarez

Naming times for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures in Spanish.

We present new Spanish norms for object familiarity and rated age of acquisition for 140 pictures taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), together with data on visual complexity, image agreement, name agreement, word length (in syllables and phonemes), and five measures of word frequency. The pictures were presented to a group of 64 Spanish subjects, and oral naming latencies were recorded. In a multiple regression analysis, age of acquisition, object familiarity, name agreement, word frequency, and word length made significant independent contributions to predicting naming latency.

Objective age of acquisition norms for a set of 328 words in Spanish

Age of acquisition is one of the most important variables in picture naming. For this reason, a large number of findings concerning age-of-acquisition data have been published in recent years in a number of different languages. In this article, objective age-of-acquisition data in Spanish for 328 pictures were collected from a pool of 760 children, half of whom were boys and the other half girls. A total of 246 pictures were selected from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set, and 82 were new pictures. Like the results of other studies, we found that objective age of acquisition correlates less than rated age of acquisition with familiarity and frequency, which indicates that the objective measure is less contaminated by other variables than are rated estimates. A very high correlation was obtained between the norms from this study and those published in English, French, Icelandic, and Italian. These norms will be very useful to Spanish psycholinguists and clinicians. Related materials may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Determinants of lexical access in speech production: Role of word frequency and age of acquisition

The main determinants of lexical access in speech are considered to be a word’s age of acquisition (AoA) and its frequency of occurrence in a speaker’s experience. It is unclear whether and how these variables interact, although they are commonly observed to be correlated, for the few studies that address the issue have reported inconsistent findings. An influential view of AoA in lexical processing (Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000) predicts stronger frequency effects for items acquired later in life than for those acquired at an early age. Five experiments were designed to investigate the possible interaction of AoA and frequency effects in speech. We found that the interaction between word frequency and AoA was not robust and that, contrary to expectation, the effect of word frequency was greater for words acquired earlier in life than for those acquired later. The implications of our findings are discussed.

The first examples of insertion of SnCl2 into the MnCl and ReCl bonds of octahedral complexes: X-ray structure of [Mn(CO)3(SnCl3)(S2CPCy3)] · CH2Cl 2

Compounds fac-[M(CO)3(S2CPR3)Cl] (M  Mn or Re; R = cyclohexyl or isopropyl) react with SnCl2 in tetrahydrofuran (THF) within 30 min to give trichlorostannyl complexes fac-[M(CO)3(S2CPR3)(SnCl3)], these being the first examples of a direct insertion of SnCl2 into MnCl or ReCl bonds of octahedral carbonyl complexes. The structure of the trichlorostannyl derivative of manganese (R = cyclohexyl) has been determined by X-ray diffraction. Several experimental facts suggest that the facile insertion of SnCl2 in the starting fac- [M(CO)3(S2CPR3)Cl] complexes should be attributed to the presence of the S2CPR3 ligands.

Areneruthenium complexes with S2CPR3 and trichlorostannate

Abstract Complexes [{(η 6 -arene) RuCl 2 } 2 ] (arene = benzene, p -cymene or hexamethylbenzene), react with trialkylphosphine-carbon disulfide adducts, S 2 CPR 3 (R = cyclohexyl, Cy; or isopropyl, 1 Pr), in refluxing ethanol in the presence of KPF 6 to afford cationic complexes [(η 6 -arene) Ru(S 2 CPR 3 )Cl]PF 6 , which have been characterized by analytical and spectroscopic methods. These complexes react with SnCl 2 in CH 2 Cl 2 /THF to afford trichlorostannato-derivatives [(η 6 -arene)Ru(S 2 CPR 3 )(SnCl 3 )]PF 6 through insertion of SnCl 2 into the RuCl bond.

S2CPR3 adducts as bridging ligands in tricobalt clusters. X-Ray structure of [Co3(CO)7(μ3-CH)(μ-S2CPCy3)]

Abstract [Co 3 (CO) 9 (μ 3 -CX)] (X  H, Cl) react with S 2 CPR 3 (R  cyclohexyl, Cy or isopropyl, i Pr) in CH 2 Cl 2 to give heptacarbonyltricobalt clusters [CO 3 (CO) 7 (μ 3 -CX)(μ 2 -S 2 CPR 3 )] in which the S 2 CPR 3 act as four-electron ligands, bridging a CoCo cluster edge in a σ(S), σ(S′) fashion, as shown by an X-ray determination on a crystal of the derivative with X  H, R  Cy. The five-membered CoSCSCo ring is nearly perpendicular to the CO 3 triangle ( i.e. axial), in contrast to the equatorial disposition usually found in related complexes with phosphorus ligands.