Rosa Sánchez-Casas

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.

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.

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/.

Speeded detection of vowels: A cross-linguistic study

In four experiments, listeners’ response times to detect vowel targets in spoken input were measured. The first three experiments were conducted in English. In two, one using real words and the other, nonwords, detection accuracy was low, targets in initial syllables were detected more slowly than targets in final syllables, and both response time and missed-response rate were inversely correlated with vowel duration. In a third experiment, the speech context for some subjects included all English vowels, while for others, only five relatively distinct vowels occurred. This manipulation had essentially no effect, and the same response pattern was again observed. A fourth experiment, conducted in Spanish, replicated the results in the first three experiments, except that miss rate was here unrelated to vowel duration. We propose that listeners’ responses to vowel targets in naturally spoken input are effectively cautious, reflecting realistic appreciation of vowel variability in natural context.

On the Representation of Inflections and Derivations: Data from Spanish

The four experiments reported in this paper were designed to determine to what extent words are lexically represented in terms of their morphological structure. The experiments are carried out in Spanish, a language with rich morphological resources, using a priming paradigm and a lexical decision task. In particular, they examined the pattern of priming effects in regular inflected words with gender and in derived words, in comparison to those produced by orthographically and semantically related words, by manipulating form similarity and semantic transparency. The results showed, on the one hand, that regular inflected words produced reliable facilitatory effects which are not driven just by form relatedness (Experiments 1 and 2). On the other hand, they showed that both transparent and nontransparent derived forms produced facilitatory effects distinct from purely orthographic and semantic effects (Experiments 3 and 4.). In general, these findings suggest that morphological information is represented in the mental lexicon and may play a central role in the individuation and retrieval of lexical entries.

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.

Effect of multiple translations and cognate status on translation recognition performance of balanced bilinguals

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual processing. The experiment included cognates and non-cognates with one translation or with multiple translations. The latter were presented with their dominant or subordinate translations. Highly-proficient balanced bilinguals responded to a translation recognition task in the two language directions (Catalan–Spanish and Spanish–Catalan). The results showed a significant multiple-translation effect in both cognates and non-cognates. Moreover, this effect was obtained regardless of language dominance and translation direction. Participants were faster and more accurate when performing translation recognition for the dominant than for the subordinate translations. The findings are interpreted adopting the Distributed Representation Model (de Groot, 1992b).

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.