Marc Guasch

Masked translation priming: Varying language experience and word type with Spanish–English bilinguals

Spanish–English bilingual lexical organization was investigated using masked cognate and non-cognate priming with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, three groups of bilinguals (Spanish dominant, English dominant and Balanced) and a single group of beginning bilinguals (Spanish) were tested with Spanish and English targets primed by cognate and non-cognate translations. All the bilingual groups showed cognate but not non-cognate priming. This cognate priming effect was similar in magnitude to the within-language repetition priming effect; it did not vary across participants who had different second-language acquisition histories, nor was the size of the priming effect modulated by the direction of the translation. The beginning bilingual group only showed cognate priming when the primes were in Spanish (L1) and the targets in English (L2). In Experiment 2, both form-related and unrelated word baselines were used with a single group of bilinguals. The results were the same as Experiment 1: cognate priming and no non-cognate priming. Experiment 3 examined the cognate priming effect with reduced orthographic and phonological overlap. Despite this reduced form overlap, it was found that the cognate effect was the same size as the within-language repetition effect. These results indicate that cognate translations are special and ways of modifying models of bilingual lexical processing to reflect this were considered.

Affective norms for 380 Spanish words belonging to three different semantic categories.

Emotional words are increasingly used in the study of word processing. To elucidate whether the experimental effects obtained with these words are due either to their affective content or to other semantic characteristics, it is necessary to conduct experiments with affectively valenced words obtained from different semantic categories. In the present article, we present affective ratings for 380 Spanish words belonging to three semantic categories: animals, people, and objects. The norms are based on the assessments made by 504 participants, who rated about 47 words either in valence and arousal, by using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley & Lang, Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 25, 49-59. 1994), or in concreteness and familiarity. These ratings will help researchers select stimuli for experiments in which both the affective properties of words and their membership to a given semantic category have to be taken into account. The database is available as an online supplement for this article.

NIM: A Web-based Swiss army knife to select stimuli for psycholinguistic studies

NIM is Web-based software developed to help experimenters with some of the usual tasks carried out in psycholinguistic studies. It allows the user to search for words according to several variables, such as length, matching substrings, lexical frequency, or part of speech, in English, Spanish, and Catalan. NIM also provides the user with the possibilities to obtain different word metrics, such as lexical frequency, length, and part of speech; to find intralanguage and cross-language lexical neighbors; and to get control words for critical stimuli. Regardless of the language used, the program also enables the user to get the orthographic similarity between word pairs and to identify repeated items in lists of experimental stimuli. NIM is free and is publicly available at http://psico.fcep.urv.cat/utilitats/nim/.

The nature of semantic priming: Effects of the degree of semantic similarity between primes and targets in Spanish

Semantic priming has been a widely used paradigm in research about semantic memory. In this study we tested the effects of the degree of semantic similarity between primes and targets (defined in terms of shared features) in semantic priming. We selected pairs of semantically related words to be used as primes and targets by using a similarity rating task and a feature generation task. Through these two tasks we obtained prime-target pairs that were more or less related in meaning (very close and close pairs). We tested these pairs in a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and in a semantic decision task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, we obtained evidence of automatic semantic priming in both the very close and the close semantic conditions. Furthermore, in both tasks we found that priming was higher for very close than close semantic words. On the basis of these findings, we can conclude that the amount of automatic semantic priming appears to depend on the degree of semantic similarity between primes and targets.

Facilitative effect of cognate words vanishes when reducing the orthographic overlap: The role of stimuli list composition

Recent research has shown that cognate word processing is modulated by variables such as degree of orthographic and phonological overlap of cognate words and task requirements in such a way that the typical preferential processing observed in the literature for cognate words relative to non-cognate words can be annulled or even reversed (Comesaña et al., 2012; Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappelli, & Baayen, 2010). These findings beg the question about the precise representation and processing of identical cognates (e.g., plata-plata, silver in Spanish and Catalan, respectively) and non-identical cognates (e.g., braç-brazo [arm]). The aim of the present study was to further explore this issue by manipulating for the 1st time cross-linguistic similarities of identical and non-identical cognate words as well as stimuli list composition. Proficient balanced Catalan-Spanish bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in Spanish. In Experiment 1 identical and non-identical cognates along with non-cognates made up the experimental list, whereas in Experiment 2 identical cognates were excluded from the list. Results showed modulations in cognate processing as a function of their degree of orthographic and phonological overlap. These results confirm prior findings regarding the processing of cognates when cross-linguistic similarities are taken into account. Most important, the direction of the cognate effect was affected by the stimuli list composition (i.e., the preferential processing for cognate words was restricted to the list containing identical cognates). Results have important implications for the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIA+; Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), especially regarding identical and non-identical cognate word representation.

Effects of the degree of meaning similarity on cross-language semantic priming in highly proficient bilinguals

This study aimed to determine if access to meaning can be directly achieved from the words in the two languages, examining the influence of the degree of semantic overlap between related words across languages in the pattern of priming effects. Nonassociative semantically related words (members of the same category) were used, avoiding explicitly associative relationships. Using a priming paradigm, highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals were visually presented with pairs of words that either were translations of each other, had a very close semantic relationship (in terms of shared features), a close semantic relationship, or no semantic relationship at all. Participants performed either a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) or a semantic decision task (Experiment 2). The main results of the study were the same in both language directions (Spanish–Catalan and Catalan–Spanish), showing that the degree of semantic overlap (in terms of shared features) between words in different languages can modulate priming effects, regardless of the language of the prime and the task used. These results demonstrate that there is cross-language activation of shared semantic representations and, thus, that highly proficient bilinguals can have direct access to word meaning from the two languages.

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.

Are there qualitative differences in the representation of abstract and concrete words? Within-language and cross-language evidence from the semantic priming paradigm

The different organizational frameworks theory proposes that there is a qualitative difference between the representation of concrete and abstract words in memory: Concrete concepts would be primarily organized in terms of semantic similarity whereas abstract concepts would be mainly organized by their association with other concepts. Evidence in support of this proposal has been mostly obtained with neuropsychological populations and, to a lesser extent, with healthy participants. In the present work, we tested the different organizational frameworks theory by using, for the first time, a semantic priming paradigm both within language and across languages. The results revealed that there was priming for both semantically similar and associative relations when words were concrete. However, with abstract words, priming was only observed when pairs and targets were associated. These results do not support the proposal of Crutch and coworkers, suggesting that the experimental paradigm as well as the type of relations tested may modulate the pattern of effects obtained with concrete and abstract words.

Pupil dilation is sensitive to the cognate status of words: further evidence for non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access

The cognate facilitation effect (i.e., a processing advantage for cognates compared to non-cognates) is an evidence of language non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access. Several studies using behavioral or electrophysiological measures have demonstrated that this effect is modulated by the degree of formal overlap between translations. However, it has never been tested with a psychophysiological measure such as pupillometry. In the present study we replicate the cognate facilitation effect by examining reaction times and pupil responses. Our results endorse pupillometry as a promising tool for bilingual research, and confirm the modulation of the cognate effect by the degree of formal similarity.

Processing of emotional words in bilinguals: Testing the effects of word concreteness, task type and language status:

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion context, and who still live in such a context, performed an affective decision task (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 2) in both Catalan and Spanish. A different set of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, who were proficient in English and who learned English after early childhood in an instructional setting, performed a lexical decision task in both Spanish and English (Experiment 3). In both tasks administered throughout the experiments, the experimental stimuli were concrete and abstract words that varied in their emotional connotation (i.e. positive, negative and neutral words) and were presented in the two languages involved. In the affective decision task, participants decided if the words had emotional content or not, and in the lexical decision task they decided if the strings of letters were real words or not. The three experiments also included an unexpected free recall task. Results showed that the emotional content of words affected bilinguals’ performance in all three tasks. In particular, there was a disadvantage in processing for negative words in both the affective and lexical decision tasks, and an advantage for positive words in the lexical decision and free recall tasks. Importantly, language only interacted with the other variables in Experiment 3, suggesting that language status is a relevant factor in determining the extent to which emotional processing has the same characteristics in the two languages.