Isabel Fraga

The Spanish adaptation of ANEW (affective norms for English words).

This article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants’ assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Apart from these dimensions, five objective (number of letters, number of syllables, grammatical class, frequency and number of orthographic neighbors) and three subjective (familiarity, concreteness and imageability) psycholinguistic indexes are included. The Spanish adaptation of ANEW can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.

Memory for emotional words in bilinguals: Do words have the same emotional intensity in the first and in the second language?

Emotionally charged words are usually better remembered than neutral words. In the current study we focused on memory for emotional words in bilinguals and examined the influence of some variables that might modulate the effect of emotionality of second-language words on recall. We tested memory for positive, negative and neutral words of two groups of proficient bilinguals of Spanish and Catalan who had acquired the second language early in life in an immersion context and who differed in their language dominance. We also tested a group of proficient Spanish–English bilinguals who had learned the second language later in life in an instruction setting. The three groups showed a superiority in recall for emotional words that was of the same magnitude in their first as in their second language. These results suggest that neither language dominance, nor the type of context, the age of second language acquisition, or the similarity between languages, seem to have any effect on memory for emotional words in the second language. They also indicate that, at least in proficient bilinguals, and when memory tasks are used, words seem to have the same emotional intensity in the first and in the second language.

Affective ratings of sound stimuli

This article present the Spanish assessments of the 111 sounds included in the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS; Bradley & Lang, 1999b). The sounds were evaluated by 159 participants in the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using a computer version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley & Lang, 1994). Results are compared with those obtained in the American version of the IADS, as well as in the Spanish adaptations of the International Affective Picture System (P. J. Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999; Moltó et al., 1999) and the Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999a; Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Comesaña, 2007).

Transposed-letter and laterality effects in lexical decision.

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in transposed-letter similarity effects. In Experiment 1, we created two types of nonwords: nonadjacent transposed-letter nonwords (TRADEGIA; the base word was TRAGEDIA, the Spanish for TRAGEDY) and two-letter different nonwords (orthographic controls: TRATEPIA). In Experiment 2, the controls were one-letter different nonwords (TRAGEPIA) instead of two-letter different nonwords (TRATEPIA). The effect of transposed-letter similarity was substantially greater in the right visual field (left hemisphere) than in the left visual field. Furthermore, nonwords created by transposing two letters were more competitive than the nonwords created by substituting one or two letters of a target word. We examine the implications of these findings for the models of visual word recognition.

Masked Nonword Repetition Effects in Yes/no and Go/no-Go Lexical Decision: A Test of the Evidence Accumulation and Deadline Accounts

The pattern of masked repetition priming effects for word and nonword targets differs across tasks: Maskedpriming effects in lexical decision occur for positive responses (i.e., words), but not for negative responses (nonwords), whereas masked-priming effects in the cross-case same-different task occur for positive responses (same), but not for negative responses (different)—regardless of lexical status. Here, we examined whether masked nonword priming effects are greater when the task involves an active go response to nonwords than when it involves the standard yes/no procedure in lexical decision. The obtained masked repetition priming effect for nonwords was of similar size in yes/no and go/no-go tasks. This finding is compatible with accounts of nonword priming that posit that nonword responses are produced by actively accumulating evidence for the nonword alternative in yes/no and go/no-go procedures, whereas it is inconsistent with the assumption of a deadline for no responses in the yes/no task.

Lexical competition is enhanced in the left hemisphere: Evidence from different types of orthographic neighbors

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in orthographic neighborhood effects. In Experiment 1, we employed two types of words: words with many substitution neighbors (high-N) and words with few substitution neighbors (low-N). Results showed a facilitative effect of N in the left visual field (i.e., right hemisphere) and an inhibitory effect of N in the right visual field (left hemisphere). In Experiment 2, we examined whether the inhibitory effect of the higher frequency neighbors increases in the left hemisphere as compared to the right hemisphere. To go beyond the usual N-metrics, we selected words with (or without) higher frequency neighbors (addition, deletion, or transposition neighbors). Results showed that the inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency is enhanced in the right visual field. We examine the implications of these findings for the orthographic coding schemes employed by the models of visual word recognition.

Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness, encoding task and affective valence

Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.

Memory for emotional words in the first and the second language: Effects of the encoding task

Emotional words are better remembered than neutral words in the first language. Ferre, Garcia, Fraga, Sanchez-Casas and Molero (2010) found this emotional effect also for second language words by using an encoding task focused on emotionality. The aim of the present study was to test whether the same effect can also be observed with encoding tasks not related to emotionality, as has been reported in monolinguals. We tested highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish that were dominant in one of these two languages. At the encoding phase, we directed their attention to words’ features other than emotionality (participants had to either rate words’ concreteness or count the number of vowels they had). In both cases, we obtained an advantage for emotional words independently of the language in which they appeared. These results suggest that the emotional effect on memory has the same characteristics in the two languages of a bilingual.

The interplay of phonology and orthography in visual cognate word recognition : an ERP study

This study examined the role of phonological and orthographic overlap in the recognition of cognate words by recording electrophysiological and behavioral data. One hundred and ninety-two words were selected: 96 cognate words listed according to their phonological and orthographic overlap vs. 96 noncognate words. Twenty-four proficient European Portuguese-English bilinguals performed a silent reading task with a masked priming paradigm. The results showed that phonology interacts with semantic activation at N400 modulations. Phonological priming effects were dependent on the orthographic overlap of cognate words. Thus, the distinctive processing of cognate words seems to be due to their cross-linguistic similarity, which is consistent with a localist connectionist account on cognate representation and processing.

Free associate norms for 139 European Portuguese words for children from different age groups

In the present study, we present normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words among 7- to 8-, 9- to 10-, and 11- to 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: (a) the percentage of associates, (b) the strength of the first associate, (c) the strength of the second associate, (d) the distance between the first and second associates, and (e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of the children, which occurred at the ages of 9–10 (5th grade) and remained stable in the 11- to 12-year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentages of associates and idiosyncratic responses, as well as an increase in the strengths of the first and second associates from the 3rd to the 5th grade. Moreover, a comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandez, and Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, and Bajo (2000) on Spanish, for the subsets of common words (16 and 58, respectively), showed that the present norms fit well with previous EP data, but differ from the Spanish data.