A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages.

Languages can express grammatical gender through different ortho-phonological regularities present in nouns (e.g., the cues "-o" and "-a" for the masculine and the feminine respectively in Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish).

A cautionary note on the studies using the picture-word interference paradigm: the unwelcome consequences of the random use of "in/animates".

The picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm allows us to delve into the process of lexical access in language production with great precision. It creates situations of interference between target pictures and superimposed distractor words that participants must consciously ignore to name the pictures. Yet, although the PWI paradigm has offered numerous insights at all levels of lexical representation, in this work we expose an extended lack of control regarding the variable animacy.

Is There an Early Morphological Decomposition during L2 Lexical Access? A Meta-Analysis on the Morphological Priming Effect.

A considerable body of experimental data currently exists on the representation and processing of derived words. However, no theoretical account has led to a consensus so far, due in part to inconsistencies in empirical results which show either the presence or the absence of signs of early morphological decomposition during lexical access. In this paper, we present the results of a meta-analysis that sought to examine the robustness of the masked morphological priming effect (MMP) in native and non-native speakers.

Corrigendum: Disentangling the role of deviant letter position on cognate word processing.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.

PHOR-in-One: A multilingual lexical database with PHonological, ORthographic and PHonographic word similarity estimates in four languages.

A large body of research seeking to explore how form affects lexical processing in bilinguals has suggested that orthographically similar translations (e.g., English-Portuguese "paper-papel") are responded to more quickly and accurately than words with little to no overlap (e.

The Multilingual Picture Database.

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research.

The mechanisms underlying grammatical gender selection in language production: A meta-analysis of the gender congruency effect.

Grammatical gender retrieval during language production has been largely addressed through the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm, with the aim of capturing the so-called gender congruency effect (GCE). In the PWI paradigm, participants name target pictures while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. The GCE shows faster responses when target and distractor nouns share the same gender than when gender differs.

Disentangling the Role of Deviant Letter Position on Cognate Word Processing.

The way of coding letter position has been extensively assessed during the recognition of native words, leading to the development of a new generation of models that assume more flexible letter position coding schemes compared to classical computational models such as the interactive activation (IA) model. However, determining whether similar letter position encoding mechanisms occur during the bilingual word recognition has been largely less explored despite its implications for the leading model of bilingual word recognition (multilink) as it assumes the input-coding scheme of the IA model. In this study, we aimed to examine this issue through the manipulation of the position of the deviant letter of cognate words (external and internal letters).

Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task.

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors.

The gender congruency effect across languages in bilinguals: A meta-analysis.

In the study of gender representation and processing in bilinguals, two contrasting perspectives exist: integrated versus autonomous (Costa, Kovacic, Franck, & Caramazza, 2003, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 181-200). In the former, cross-linguistic interactions during the selection of grammatical gender values are expected; in the latter, they are not. To address this issue, authors have typically explored the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect (GCE; a facilitation on the naming or translation of second language [L2] nouns when their first language [L1] translations are of the same gender, in comparison to those of a different gender).

Lexico-syntactic interactions during the processing of temporally ambiguous L2 relative clauses: An eye-tracking study with intermediate and advanced Portuguese-English bilinguals.

There is extensive evidence showing that bilinguals activate the lexical and the syntactic representations of both languages in a nonselective way. However, the extent to which the lexical and the syntactic levels of representations interact during second language (L2) sentence processing and how those interactions are modulated by L2 proficiency remain unclear. This paper aimed to directly address these issues by using an online technique (eye-tracking) that is highly sensitive to the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence reading.

Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review.

In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing behavioral studies of mainly late second language (L2) learners on the so-called gender congruency (GC) effect (facilitated processing for translation equivalents with the same gender, in comparison to those with a different gender) in L2 production and comprehension. The majority of the results showed a GC effect, regardless of the type of language involved.

Emotional Content and Source Memory for Language: Impairment in an Incidental Encoding Task.

Research into the effects of emotion on source memory (i.e., memory for certain contextual details of a stimulus, such as its location, color, or temporal context) has yielded inconsistent findings.

Is There an Orthographic Boost for Ambiguous Words During Their Processing?

The present study explores the issue of why ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous ones during word recognition. To this end we contrasted two different hypotheses: the semantic feedback hypothesis (Hino and Lupker in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 22:1331-1356, 1996. https://doi.

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database.

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g.

Portuguese Norms of Name Agreement, Concept Familiarity, Subjective Frequency and Visual Complexity for 150 Colored and Tridimensional Pictures.

Pictures are complex stimuli that require a careful control of several characteristics and attributes standardized for different languages. In this work we present for the first time European Portuguese (EP) norms for name agreement, concept familiarity, subjective frequency and visual complexity for a new set of 150 colored pictures. These pictures were selected to represent exemplars of the most used semantic categories in research and to depict objects which, though familiar to the participants, were rarely used in daily life, which makes them particularly prone to speech failures such as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states.

The impact of cognateness of word bases and suffixes on morpho-orthographic processing: A masked priming study with intermediate and high-proficiency Portuguese-English bilinguals.

Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes).

The ERP signature of the contextual diversity effect in visual word recognition.

Behavioral experiments have revealed that words appearing in many different contexts are responded to faster than words that appear in few contexts. Although this contextual diversity (CD) effect has been found to be stronger than the word-frequency (WF) effect, it is a matter of debate whether the facilitative effects of CD and WF reflect the same underlying mechanisms. The analysis of the electrophysiological correlates of CD may shed some light on this issue.

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words.

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words-three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese.

On the nature of consonant/vowel differences in letter position coding: Evidence from developing and adult readers.

In skilled adult readers, transposed-letter effects (jugde-JUDGE) are greater for consonant than for vowel transpositions. These differences are often attributed to phonological rather than orthographic processing. To examine this issue, we employed a scenario in which phonological involvement varies as a function of reading experience: A masked priming lexical decision task with 50-ms primes in adult and developing readers.

Is VIRTU4L larger than VIR7UAL? Automatic processing of number quantity and lexical representations in leet words.

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.

Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance.

Research shows that contextual diversity (CD; the number of different contexts in which a word appears within a corpus) constitutes a better predictor of reading performance than word frequency (WF), that it mediates the access to lexical representations, and that controlling for contextual CD abolishes the effect of WF in lexical decision tasks. Despite the theoretical relevance of these findings for the study of serial memory, it is not known how CD might affect serial recall performance. We report the first independent manipulation of CD and WF in a serial recall task.

The role of emotionality in the acquisition of new concrete and abstract words.

A processing advantage for emotional words relative to neutral words has been widely demonstrated in the monolingual domain (e.g., Kuperman et al.

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.

Adaptation of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) for European Portuguese.

This study presents the results of the adaptation of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) for European Portuguese (EP). Following the original procedure of Lang et al., 2000 native speakers of EP rated the 1,182 pictures of the last version of the IAPS set on the three affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM).