Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3,359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 – 9-years-old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word’s referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children’s experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.

Leading Us Unto Temptation? No Evidence for an Asymmetry in Automatic Associations Between Goals and Temptations

The asymmetry hypothesis of counteractive control theory suggests that—at least for successful self-regulators—exposure to temptations facilitates the accessibility of goal-related cognitive constructs, whereas exposure to goals inhibits the accessibility of temptation-related cognitive constructs. Using a lexical decision task, Fishbach et al., 2003 (Study 3) found that this asymmetry existed even at an automatic level of processing. In this attempted replication, 221 students completed a lexical decision task that included goal-related and temptation-related stimuli words preceded by either a goal-related prime, a temptation-related prime, or an irrelevant prime. Unlike the original study, we found only significant priming effects, where temptation-primes facilitated the recognition of goal-related words and goal-primes likewise facilitated the recognition of temptation-related words. We did not replicate the previously reported asymmetry. Additionally, we found no significant moderation of the hypothesized priming asymmetry by any of the traits of self-regulatory success, construal level, temptation strength, or self-control, again failing to replicate prior findings. The same priming patterns were found among participants who completed the study in-lab and those who completed the study online. This replication study suggests that the cognitive associations between goals and temptations are relatively symmetric and faciliatory, at least during the initial, automatic level of cognitive processing.

Lexical access in Portuguese stress

Categorical approaches to lexical stress typically assume that words have either regular or irregular stress, and imply that only the latter needs to be stored in the lexicon, while the former can be derived by rule. In this paper, we compare these two groups of words in a lexical decision task in Portuguese to examine whether the dichotomy in question affects lexical retrieval latencies in native speakers, which could indirectly reveal different processing patterns. Our results show no statistically credible effect of stress regularity on reaction times, even when lexical frequency, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability are taken into consideration. The lack of an effect is consistent with a probabilistic approach to stress, not with a categorical (traditional) approach where syllables are either light or heavy and stress is either regular or irregular. We show that the posterior distribution of credible effect sizes of regularity is almost entirely (96.28%) within the region of practical equivalence, which provides strong evidence that no effect of regularity exists in the lexical decision data modelled. Frequency and phonotactic probability, in contrast, showed statistically credible effects given the experimental data modelled, which is consistent with the literature.

Task-specific contribution of the right posterior cerebellum to language processing in healthy individuals

Clinical and neuroscientific studies in healthy volunteers have established that the cerebellum contributes to language comprehension and production. Yet most evidence is correlational and the exact role of the cerebellum remains unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the right cerebellum in unimpaired language comprehension and production using non-invasive brain stimulation. In this double-blind, sham-controlled experiment, thirty-six healthy participants received anodal or sham transcranial direct current (tDCS) stimulation to the right cerebellum while performing a lexical decision, sentence comprehension, verbal fluency and language-unrelated control task. Results showed that anodal relative to sham tDCS caused faster manual responses in the lexical decision task. Additional exploratory analyses suggest load-specific performance modulation in the sentence comprehension and lexical decision task, with tDCS improving performance in low-load trials of the sentence comprehension task and high-load trials in the lexical decision task. Overall, our findings provide evidence for the involvement of the right posterior cerebellum in comprehension-based language tasks requiring a manual response. Further research is needed to dissociate the influence of task difficulty and timing of the underlying cognitive processes.

The Omission of Accent Marks Does Not Hinder Word Recognition: Evidence From Spanish

Recent research has found that the omission of accent marks in Spanish does not produce slower word identification times in go/no-go lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks [e.g., cárcel (prison) = carcel], thus suggesting that vowels like á and a are represented by the same orthographic units during word recognition and reading. However, there is a discrepant finding with the yes/no lexical decision task, where the words with the omitted accent mark produced longer response times than the words with the accent mark. In Experiment 1, we examined this discrepant finding by running a yes/no lexical decision experiment comparing the effects for words and non-words. Results showed slower response times for the words with omitted accent mark than for those with the accent mark present (e.g., cárcel < carcel). Critically, we found the opposite pattern for non-words: response times were longer for the non-words with accent marks (e.g., cárdil > cardil), thus suggesting a bias toward a “word” response for accented items in the yes/no lexical decision task. To test this interpretation, Experiment 2 used the same stimuli with a blocked design (i.e., accent mark present vs. omitted in all items) and a go/no-go lexical decision task (i.e., respond only to “words”). Results showed similar response times to words regardless of whether the accent mark was omitted (e.g., cárcel = carcel). This pattern strongly suggests that the longer response times to words with an omitted accent mark in yes/no lexical decision experiments are a task-dependent effect rather than a genuine reading cost.

PROCESSING EMOTION WORDS IN THE LATE-LEARNED L2

Language-emotion link has been a subject of interest for several decades. It has been studied extensively both in the monolingual and bilingual literature. However, due to the numerous factors that are at play in bilingualism, i.e. age and context of acquisition, frequency of use, there is conflicting evidence regarding the emotional load of each language of bilinguals. A great bulk of evidence leans towards the L1 as the more emotional language. This study investigates the perceived emotionality in the late learned language. Our participants (N = 57) were late bilinguals who learned their second language (English) in formal contexts after their first language (Turkish). We used a lexical decision task in which the participants determined whether the visually presented emotion words were real words or non-words. In line with the literature, we report faster response times for positive than for negative words in both languages. Also, the results showed L1 superiority in word processing.

The Influence of Negative Orthographic Neighborhood in the Lexical Decision Task: Valence and Arousal Contributions

This study investigated whether the visual recognition of neutral words might be influenced by the emotional dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal) of orthographically similar lexical representations, and whether this might also depend on emotional-related traits of participants (i.e., alexithymia). To this end, 108 participants performed a lexical decision task with 80 neutral words with a higher frequency orthographic neighbor that varied in valence (from neutral to negative) and arousal (from low to high). The main finding was the expected interaction effect between the valence and arousal of the neighbor on the lexical decision times of neutral stimulus words. Longer reaction times were found when the valence score of the neighbor decreased from neutral to negative for words with a low-arousal orthographic neighbor while this emotional neighbor effect was reversed for words with a high-arousal negative neighbor. This combined influence of the valence and arousal of the neighbor was interpreted in terms of increased lexical competition processes and direct influence of the affective system on the participant’s response. Moreover, this interaction effect was smaller when the level of alexithymia of the participants increased, suggesting that people with a higher level of alexithymia are less sensitive to the emotional content of the neighbor. The results are discussed within an interactive activation model of visual word recognition incorporating an affective system with valence and arousal dimensions, with regard to the role of the alexithymia level of participants.

Task-domain and hemisphere-asymmetry effects in cisgender and transmale individuals

The present research examined the extent to which transmale individuals’ functional brain organization resembles that of their assigned sex or gender identity. Cisgender-female, cisgender-male, and transmale participants, who were assigned female sex but did not have a female gender identity, were compared in terms of effects that have been observed in cisgender individuals: task-domain effects, in which males perform better than females on spatial tasks and females perform better than males on verbal tasks; and hemisphere-asymmetry effects, in which males show larger differences between the left and right hemispheres than females. In addition, the present research measured participants’ intelligence in order to control for potential moderating effects. Participants performed spatial (mental rotation) and verbal (lexical decision) tasks presented to each hemisphere using a divided-visual field paradigm, and then completed an intelligence assessment. In the mental-rotation task, cismale and transmale participants performed better than cisfemale participants, however this group difference was explained by intelligence scores, with higher scores predicting better performance. In the lexical-decision task, cismale and transmale participants exhibited a greater left-hemisphere advantage than cisfemales, and this difference was not affected by intelligence scores. Taken together, results do not support task-domain effects when intelligence is accounted for; however, they do demonstrate a hemisphere-asymmetry effect in the verbal domain that is moderated by gender identity and not assigned sex.

AgingPLUS: Examining the Malleability of Implicit Views of Aging

AgingPLUS also examines whether the intervention can change participants’ implicit VOA. To that end, participants completed a lexical decision-making task (LDMT) and the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) at baseline and post-intervention. One-way ANCOVAs with baseline scores as covariate were used for these analyses. For LDMT, there was no significant difference between the groups regarding their post-intervention latencies for old-positive words, F(1,181) = 0.01, p = .60, old-negative words, F(1,181) = 0.43, p = .51, young-positive words, F(1,181) = 0.19, p = .67, and young-negative words, F(1,181) = 1.16, p = .28. For BIAT, both groups showed a slight preference for the young at baseline (mean d = 0.39), and post-intervention (mean d = 0.38). There was no significant difference between the groups regarding post-intervention d scores, F(1,181) = 0.002, p = .97. These preliminary findings suggest that in the current subsample, AgingPLUS did not significantly change participants’ implicit VOA.