Jelena Havelka

Emotional activation in the first and second language

Late Finnish–English bilinguals were presented with neutral, positive, negative and taboo words in a modified Stroop paradigm in both Finnish and English. Significant interference from negative and taboo words compared to neutral words was found in both languages, whereas positive words were not found to differ significantly from neutral words. Furthermore, no differences in the size of the interference were present between languages. This suggests that, for late bilinguals with good knowledge of their second language, the first (L1) and second (L2) language are equally capable of activating the emotional response to word stimuli representing threat, and thus interfering with the cognitive processes involved in responding to colour. This effect was equivalent for negative and taboo words.

Affective norms for 210 British English and Finnish nouns

This article presents affective ratings for 210 British English and Finnish nouns, including taboo words. The norms were collected with 135 native British English and 304 native Finnish speakers, who rated the words according to their emotional valence, emotional charge, offensiveness, concreteness, and familiarity. The ratings between the two languages were found to be strongly correlated. The present ratings were also strongly correlated with the American English emotional valence and arousal ratings available in the Affective Norms for English Words database (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and the Janschewitz (2008) database for taboo words. These ratings will help researchers to select stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments involving both monolingual and bilingual processing of British English and Finnish emotional words. Materials associated with this article may be accessed as an online supplement from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Living in History How War, Terrorism, and Natural Disaster Affect the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

Memories of war, terrorism, and natural disaster play a critical role in the construction of group identity and the persistence of group conflict. Here, we argue that personal memory and knowledge of the collective past become entwined only when public events have a direct, forceful, and prolonged impact on a population. Support for this position comes from a cross-national study in which participants thought aloud as they dated mundane autobiographical events. We found that Bosnians often mentioned their civil war and that Izmit Turks made frequent reference to the 1999 earthquake in their country. In contrast, public events were rarely mentioned by Serbs, Montenegrins, Ankara Turks, Canadians, Danes, or Israelis. Surprisingly, historical references were absent from (post–September 11) protocols collected in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. Taken together, these findings indicate that it is personal significance, not historical importance, that determines whether public events play a role in organizing autobiographical memory.

Behavioural and physiological responses to the emotional and taboo Stroop tasks in native and non-native speakers of English:

Skin conductance levels (SCLs) of native and non-native English speakers were measured during emotional and taboo Stroop tasks. Significantly slower response times to negative and taboo words when compared to neutral words were found in both groups of participants, but positive words were not found to differ significantly from neutral words. No differences between native and non-native speakers in their behavioural responses were present: the pattern of interference from negative and taboo words was found to be identical in L1 and L2. SCLs, however, did reveal differences between the native and non-native participants: native English speakers responded with significantly higher SCLs to negative and taboo words when compared with neutral and positive words. This difference was not observed in non-native speakers, although there was a trend for taboo words to elicit greater SCLs than positive words. This suggests that, although the two groups responded in a very similar manner on a behavioural level, the level of arousal produced by the negative and taboo words for native English speakers was greater than that for non-native speakers.

Age of acquisition in naming Japanese words

The effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on word naming in Japanese was examined. Half of the participants had words presented in Kanji, and for the other half the same words were presented in Kana. There was a main effect of script with words being read aloud faster when presented in their Kana compared to Kanji transcription, and a main effect of AoA with faster naming times to earlier acquired stimuli. The interaction between AoA and type of script was also significant, with the AoA effect being larger when naming words presented in Kanji compared to naming the same words when presented in Kana. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the size of the AoA effect is influenced by the nature of mapping between orthography and phonology.

Visuospatial bootstrapping: Long-term memory representations are necessary for implicit binding of verbal and visuospatial working memory

It has recently been shown that presenting additional visuospatial information alongside to-be-remembered numbers in a digit span task enhances participants’ memory for those items. However, the mechanisms behind this visuospatial bootstrapping effect have remained unspecified. In this article, we report evidence that this effect involves an integration of information from verbal and visuospatial temporary memory with long-term-memory (LTM) representations and that the existence of a relevant LTM representation is necessary for bootstrapping to occur.

The cross-script length effect: further evidence challenging PDP models of reading aloud.

The interaction between length and lexical status is one of the key findings used in support of models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the orthography-to-phonology translation (B. S. Weekes, 1997). However, proponents of parallel models argue that this effect arises in peripheral visual or articulatory processes. The authors addressed this possibility using the special characteristics of the Serbian and Japanese writing systems. Experiment 1 examined length effects in Serbian when participants were biased to interpret phonologically bivalent stimuli in the alphabet in which they are words or in the alphabet in which they are nonwords (i.e., the visual characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Experiment 2 examined length effects in Japanese kana when words were presented in the kana script in which they usually appear or in the script in which they do not normally appear (i.e., the phonological characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Results in both cases showed a larger length effect when stimuli were treated as nonwords and thus offered strong support to models of reading aloud that postulate a serial component.

The assembly of phonology from print is serial and subject to strategic control: evidence from serbian.

The Serbian writing system was used to investigate whether a serial procedure is implicated in print-to-sound translation and whether components of the reading aloud system can be strategically controlled. In mixed- and pure-alphabet lists, participants read aloud phonologically bivalent words comprising bivalent letters in initial or final positions. Words with bivalent letters in initial positions were disadvantaged relative to nonbivalent controls to a greater degree than were words with bivalent letters in final positions, and the size of the effect was greater in the mixed-alphabet situations than it was in the pure-alphabet situations. A dual-route theory of bialphabetic reading aloud is proposed in which the nonlexical procedure operates serially and nonlexical spelling-sound correspondences for each script can be strategically emphasized or deemphasized.

Language representation and processing in fluent bilinguals: Electrophysiological evidence for asymmetric mapping in bilingual memory

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words, one in English and one in Spanish, and asked to indicate whether or not the words had the same meaning. In half the trials the Spanish word preceded the English, and in the other half the English word preceded the Spanish. In each condition half of the words had the same meaning, and the experiment included both concrete and abstract word trials. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine lexical-semantic activation during word translation. As predicted, a direction-dependent translation asymmetry was observed in the magnitude of the N400 repetition effect. Specifically, the N400 effect was larger during backward translation (L2-L1) than during forward translation (L1-L2) in both groups of bilinguals. Results are considered in the context of different models of bilingual memory.

Visuospatial bootstrapping: Evidence for binding of verbal and spatial information in working memory

Traditionally, working memory is held to comprise separate subcomponents dedicated to the temporary storage of visuospatial and verbal information. More recently, the addition of an episodic buffer has been proposed where information from multiple memory systems is integrated. We report an experiment designed to investigate the effects of providing additional visuospatial information in a verbal working memory task. When to-be-remembered digits were arranged in a horizontal line, performance was no better than when digits were presented in a single location. However, when digits were presented in a keyboard array, performance was significantly better. It is argued that this pattern is hard to reconcile with the traditional model of working memory, and that the “spatial bootstrapping” effect provides evidence towards models of working memory that incorporate an episodic buffer.