Josep Demestre
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Departament de Psicologia, Faculty Member
- Departamento de Psicologia, Languages and Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Reading Comprehension, and 20 morePriming, Sentence Processing, Language Processing, Psychology, Philosophy, Education, Syntactic Parsing, Semantic relations, Masked Priming, Event related brain potentials (ERPs), Semantic similarity, Parsing, Bilingualism and cognition, Bilingualism, Psychometrics, Item Response Theory, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Second Language Acquisition, and Spanish Linguisticsedit
- I am Associate Professor at the Psychology Department at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. The focus of my research i... moreI am Associate Professor at the Psychology Department at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. The focus of my research is human language processing, in particular the comprehension of sentences. I use behavioral and electrophysiological (ERPs) techniques to assess the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in language processing at this level.edit
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This study investigates the extent to which highly proficient Spanish–Catalan bilinguals activate Spanish translation equivalents when they are presented with Catalan words. Participants performed a translation recognition task... more
This study investigates the extent to which highly proficient Spanish–Catalan bilinguals activate Spanish translation equivalents when they are presented with Catalan words. Participants performed a translation recognition task (Experiment 1) or a primed lexical decision task (Experiment 2) where the relationship between the first presented (Catalan) word and the second presented (Spanish) word was manipulated. Semantic and form relationships between the first and the second words were examined. Semantic relatedness produced a behavioral interference effect in the translation recognition task and a facilitation effect in the primed lexical decision task. The semantic manipulation also affected the N400 component. Form relatedness produced a behavioral interference effect only in the translation recognition task, which was accompanied by a modulation of the LPC component. In contrast, there were no effects of the formal manipulation in the primed lexical decision task. These results,...
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Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically... more
Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinators and and or—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—a language of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical ...
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Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences... more
Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences (i.e., world knowledge). According to such theories, the former meaning is privileged over the latter in terms of the time-course of its access and influence during on-line language comprehension. The present study aims to examine whether world knowledge anomalies (that do not violate selectional restrictions) are rapidly detected during online sentence processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific verb (entrevistar or secuestrar, the Spanish translations for to interview and to kidnap) depended on the agent of the event (periodista or terrorista, the Spanish translations for journalist and terrorist). The results showed an effect of typicality in regression path duration and total reading times at b...
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Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations:... more
Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction and and (inclusive) disjunction or. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and ...
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This study assessed the functioning and measurement properties of Rotter's Locus of Control Scale in its Spanish version by using a new approach based on Item Response Theory. Our procedure allows us: (a) to detect the impact of... more
This study assessed the functioning and measurement properties of Rotter's Locus of Control Scale in its Spanish version by using a new approach based on Item Response Theory. Our procedure allows us: (a) to detect the impact of response biases (acquiescence and social desirability); (b) to evaluate clearly the test dimensionality and structure; (c) to evaluate and understand the causes of some items' inefficiency; and (d) to increase measurement precision. Globally, the results do not contradict those obtained in previous research, but allow some of the criticisms the scale had received to be qualified. Some recommendations for use are proposed.
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Abstract In the present study we examined electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of ambiguous word processing. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with ambiguous words with unrelated meanings (i.e., homonyms;... more
Abstract In the present study we examined electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of ambiguous word processing. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with ambiguous words with unrelated meanings (i.e., homonyms; e.g., bat), ambiguous words with related meanings (i.e., polysemes; e.g., newspaper), and unambiguous words (e.g., guitar). Ambiguous words elicited larger N400 amplitudes than unambiguous words and showed an advantage in RTs. Importantly, no differences were found between homonyms and polysemes, on either N400 amplitudes or in RTs. These results suggest that ambiguous words, regardless of the relatedness between their meanings, benefit from enhanced semantic activation in comparison to unambiguous words during word recognition.
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En este trabajo se describen cuatro procedimientos de detección del funcionamiento diferencial del ítem para formatos de respuesta politómica: Mantel, Mantel-Haenszel Generalizado (GMH), Regresión Logística Ordinal (RLO) y Regresión... more
En este trabajo se describen cuatro procedimientos de detección del funcionamiento diferencial del ítem para formatos de respuesta politómica: Mantel, Mantel-Haenszel Generalizado (GMH), Regresión Logística Ordinal (RLO) y Regresión Logística Discriminante (RLD). Además de los modelos teóricos se describen las medidas del tamaño del efecto utilizables con cada uno de ellos. Con un diseño de validación cruzada se analizan los ítems politómicos de dos cuadernillos de la prueba de comprensión lectora del programa PISA2000. Las muestras analizadas provienen de Estados Unidos y España. Adoptando como regla de decisión la significación de la prueba estadística y la medida del tamaño del efecto, el acuerdo entre los procedimientos evaluados es total para dos de los ítems analizados
Research Interests: Psychology and Psicothema
Numerous studies have suggested that under certain circumstances (e.g., immersion in the second language environment) the production of the native language (L1) in adult second language learners can be influenced by features of the second... more
Numerous studies have suggested that under certain circumstances (e.g., immersion in the second language environment) the production of the native language (L1) in adult second language learners can be influenced by features of the second language (L2) (Flege, 1987; Flege & Eefting, 1987; Pavlenko, 2000; Pavlenko & Jarvis, 2002; Porte, 2003). Comparatively fewer studies have investigated whether the L2 can induce changes in the processing of the L1. To begin to fill this gap, this study examines whether L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers immersed in the L2 environment for an extended period of time show processing strategies in their L1 that are different from monolingual speakers. Immersion was examined because past studies have shown that years of immersion experience in the L2 can impact processing in the L1 (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Participants were presented with written sentences in their L1 that were syntactically ambiguous between a relative clause reading and a sentence compl...
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Abstract Previous behavioral findings showed that pairs of words that are highly related in meaning across two languages and pairs in which the second word is related in lexical form to the correct translation of the first one produce... more
Abstract Previous behavioral findings showed that pairs of words that are highly related in meaning across two languages and pairs in which the second word is related in lexical form to the correct translation of the first one produce interference effects when highly proficient balanced bilinguals perform a translation recognition task (Ferre, Sanchez-Casas, & Guasch, 2006; Moldovan, Sanchez-Casas, Demestre, & Ferre, 2012). In contrast, interference effects were not observed when the two words were less related in meaning. The lack of interference with less related words could be explained by the fact that the level of activation of the corresponding semantic representations is too low so as to produce interference at the time the translation decision has to be made. Moreover, behavioral measures might be not sensitive enough to capture the activation of such representations. In the present study, highly proficient balanced Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a translation recognition task in which a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, i.e., 250 ms) was used and event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. There were three critical conditions: pairs of words highly related in meaning, pairs of words less related in meaning, and pairs in which the second word was similar in lexical form to the correct translation of the first word. Behavioral results showed interference effects in all conditions. ERPs revealed modulations of the N400 for the two semantic conditions, and modulations of the LPC for the form condition. These results reveal that when short SOAs and sensitive measures are used, interference effects with words less related in meaning are obtained as well. In addition, these findings suggest that meaning is accessed before the translation equivalent becomes available, that is, highly proficient balanced bilinguals can directly access the conceptual system from both of their languages.
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Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of... more
Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an adjective predicated of it. The rapid detection of this anomaly would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and an antecedent, and that the processor had rapidly consulted verb control information to select the proper antecedent of the null subject. The results showed that for both subject and object control items ungrammatical adjectives elicited a P600 effect. These data imply that the processor has coindexed the null subject with an antecedent, and that the antecedent has been selected on the basis of control information. These results are compatible with parsing models that emphasize the...
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The present study introduces the first Spanish database with normative ratings of semantic similarity for 185 word triplets. Each word triplet is constituted by a target word (e.g., guisante [pea]) and two semantically related and... more
The present study introduces the first Spanish database with normative ratings of semantic similarity for 185 word triplets. Each word triplet is constituted by a target word (e.g., guisante [pea]) and two semantically related and nonassociatively related words: a word highly related in meaning to the target (e.g., judía [bean]), and a word less related in meaning to the target (e.g., patata [potato]). The degree of meaning similarity was assessed by 332 participants by using a semantic similarity rating task on a 9-point scale. Pairs having a value of semantic similarity ranging from 5 to 9 were classified as being more semantically related, whereas those with values ranging from 2 to 4.99 were considered as being less semantically related. The relative distance between the two pairs for the same target ranged from 0.48 to 5.07 points. Mean comparisons revealed that participants rated the more similar words as being significantly more similar in meaning to the target word than were...
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ABSTRACT This article proposes a model-based procedure, intended for personality measures, for exploiting the auxiliary information provided by the certainty with which individuals answer every item (response certainty). This information... more
ABSTRACT This article proposes a model-based procedure, intended for personality measures, for exploiting the auxiliary information provided by the certainty with which individuals answer every item (response certainty). This information is used to (a) obtain more accurate estimates of individual trait levels, and (b) provide a more detailed assessment of the consistency with which the individual responds to the test. The basis model consists of 2 submodels: an item response theory submodel for the responses, and a linear-in-the-coefficients submodel that describes the response certainties. The latter is based on the distance-difficulty hypothesis, and is parameterized as a factor-analytic model. Procedures for (a) estimating the structural parameters, (b) assessing model–data fit, (c) estimating the individual parameters, and (d) assessing individual fit are discussed. The proposal was used in an empirical study. Model–data fit was acceptable and estimates were meaningful. Furthermore, the precision of the individual trait estimates and the assessment of the individual consistency improved noticeably.
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We proposed that the correlation between an item score and the total acquiescence score in a balanced scale is an index for measuring the extent to which the response to this item is affected by acquiescence. In an empirical study, which... more
We proposed that the correlation between an item score and the total acquiescence score in a balanced scale is an index for measuring the extent to which the response to this item is affected by acquiescence. In an empirical study, which used the perceived stress scale, the values of this psychometric index were related to two objective ‘superficial structure’ characteristics:
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In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the... more
In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the effects of two variables related to word-type. We tested proficient unbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked translation priming paradigm conducted in the two translation directions (L1 to L2, and L2 to L1), by orthogonally manipulating for the first time concreteness and cognate status. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was also manipulated (50 ms vs 100 ms). Results revealed modulations in masked priming effects as a function of cognate status and translation direction. However, the effect of concreteness was only observed at the long SOA. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant models of bilingual memory, mainly the Distributed Feature Model (de Groot, 1992a).
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Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages typically verbalise... more
Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages typically verbalise only two of the sixteen connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts —"and" and "or"— the remainder appear to be entertainable as non-verbal, conceptual representations and this suggests a way to probe how linguistic and non-linguistic thinking processes relate. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking both comprehension-related and reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word for logic’s NAND operator, indicating that unlexicalised logical connectives are nonetheless conceptually available.
We offer a re-evaluation of the tone-monitoring technique in the study of parsing. Experiment 1 shows that reaction times (RTs) to tones are affected by two factors: a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a... more
We offer a re-evaluation of the tone-monitoring technique in the study of parsing. Experiment 1 shows that reaction times (RTs) to tones are affected by two factors: a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover plays a role in neutralising differences between sentence types. Experiment 2 successfully discriminates these two factors by registering event-related brain potentials during a monitoring task, establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components —the first associated with temporal uncertainty, the second with processing load— correlate with RTs. Experiment 3 then behaviourally segregates the two factors by placing the last tone at the end of sentences, activating a wrap-up operation and thereby both disrupting the decreasing tendency and highlighting structural factors.
PRO is one of the ECs postulated by GB Theory (see Chomsky, 1981, 1986). PRO is a non-overt NP that occurs as the subject of non-finite clauses. The module of the grammar that regulates the occurrence and interpretation of PRO is called... more
PRO is one of the ECs postulated by GB Theory (see Chomsky, 1981, 1986). PRO is a non-overt NP that occurs as the subject of non-finite clauses. The module of the grammar that regulates the occurrence and interpretation of PRO is called control theory. Control theory specifies which element is the coindexed antecedent (or the controller) of PRO. PRO is controlled by (or coindexed with) an antecedent in the next higher clause.
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En este trabajo se abordan dos cuestiones relativas al procesamiento on-line del sujeto nulo de los complementos de infinitivo. Por un lado, examinamos si a dicho sujeto se le asigna rapida o tardiamente un antecedente. Por otro lado,... more
En este trabajo se abordan dos cuestiones relativas al procesamiento on-line del sujeto nulo de los complementos de infinitivo. Por un lado, examinamos si a dicho sujeto se le asigna rapida o tardiamente un antecedente. Por otro lado, examinamos si dicho proceso de asignacion se guia por la informacion de control de los verbos, o, si por el contrario, se guia por estrategias basadas en un criterio de distancia sin consultar la informacion de los verbos. Estas dos cuestiones han generado un interesante debate entre los defensores de dos posturas teoricas (una de caracter estructural y otra de caracter lexicalista). Para abordar estas dos cuestiones se llevaron a cabo dos experimentos de potenciales evocados cerebrales en los que se usaron oraciones con complementos de infinitivo que, dependiendo del verbo principal, estaban controlados bien por el sujeto bien por el objeto de la clausula principal. En la mitad de las frases utilizadas se introdujo un fallo de concordancia de genero e...
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ABSTRACT The click-detection paradigm was employed to probe the load exerted by the parser within simple Spanish sentences. In Experiment 1, three positions at the beginning of clauses were established and results suggest that Ss are... more
ABSTRACT The click-detection paradigm was employed to probe the load exerted by the parser within simple Spanish sentences. In Experiment 1, three positions at the beginning of clauses were established and results suggest that Ss are better prepared the deeper into a sentence the click is. Experiment 2 ran an ERP experiment to determine whether these RTs were the result of the “uncertainty” Ss may have felt regarding the click position, the idea being that the amplitude of the P300 would correlate with the click positions. In Experiment 3, click positions were moved to the end of clauses to establish if the end of a sentence results in a specific strain on working memory. RTs show that Ss are slower in the first position but the measures even out after that, with the possibility that Ss may have attempted to “wrap it up” in both the second and the third positions.
Resumen en: Previous evidence has shown that word pairs that are either related in form (e.g., ruc-berro; donkey-watercress) or very closely semantically related (e...
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Past results with the click monitoring technique have pointed to an endof-clause effect, but we here show that the issues at hand are a bit more nuanced —and more interesting. Firstly, by employing two types of simple, subject-verb-object... more
Past results with the click monitoring technique have pointed to an endof-clause effect, but we here show that the issues at hand are a bit more nuanced —and more interesting. Firstly, by employing two types of simple, subject-verb-object sentences and three click positions, we report two experiments (1a and 1b) which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: a) a strong perceptual effect we dub the position effect, involved in monitoring tasks in general, and which neutralises structural differences across experimental conditions; and b) the incremental processing the parser carries out means that more resources to respond to a tone are released as a sentence is presented, as evidenced in the tendency of RTs to decrease across a sentence. These two factors are then successfully discriminated and recorded by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in a click monitoring task, with experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components —t...
This study presents semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words. Two subjective measures of semantic ambiguity and two subjective measures of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings were collected. In addition, two objective measures of... more
This study presents semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words. Two subjective measures of semantic ambiguity and two subjective measures of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings were collected. In addition, two objective measures of semantic ambiguity were included. Furthermore, subjective ratings were obtained for some relevant lexicosemantic variables, such as concreteness, familiarity, emotional valence, arousal, and age of acquisition. In sum, the database overcomes some of the limitations of the published databases of Spanish ambiguous words; in particular, the scarcity of measures of ambiguity, the lack of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings measures, and the absence of a set of unambiguous words. Thus, it will be very helpful for researchers interested in exploring semantic ambiguity as well as for those using semantic ambiguous words to study language processing in clinical populations.
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The work presented here uses an adjustment method to test the vertical-horizontal illusion across four different configurations: a cross-shape, an L-shape, an inverted-T and a rotated-T. We examine the modulatory role of the variables... more
The work presented here uses an adjustment method to test the vertical-horizontal illusion across four different configurations: a cross-shape, an L-shape, an inverted-T and a rotated-T. We examine the modulatory role of the variables visual frame and direction of the adjustment on the illusory effect. Two experiments were performed, one with rectangular and one with curvilinear visual frames. Our data show that in both experiments, the size of the expected illusion increases from the cross-shape to the L-shape and from the L-shape to the inverted-T, where it reaches its maximum. In the rotated-T, the illusion reverses reaching a significant effect in the opposite direction. This pattern of results appears consistently across different experimental conditions, although the variability in the amount of illusory effect seems to be modulated by the intervention of the two variables examined. A dissection of the vertical-horizontal illusion has been carried out in terms of a two-factor ...
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Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393-1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm... more
Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393-1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm interacts with statistical learning and speech perception. Past results with this monitoring technique have pointed to an end-of-clause effect in parsing-a structural effect-but we here show that the issues are a bit more nuanced. Firstly, we report two Experiments (1a and 1b), which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: (a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and (b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover helps neutralize differences between sentences with slightly different structures. These two factors are then successfully discriminated by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a monitoring task, with Experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes ...
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The present study examines whether processing a word in one language is affected by the grammatical gender of its translation equivalent in another language. To this end, a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a... more
The present study examines whether processing a word in one language is affected by the grammatical gender of its translation equivalent in another language. To this end, a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a translation–recognition task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants were presented with Catalan and Spanish pairs of words and had to decide if they were translation equivalents. Correct translations included words that were gender congruent (estiuMAS/veranoMAS–summer) or gender incongruent (tardorFEM/otoñoMAS–autumn). The behavioral results showed that participants were faster and more accurate in the gender-congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. The ERP data showed a reduced N400 for the congruent condition. The facilitative effect of gender congruency observed in this study constitutes evidence of the obligatory access to grammatical gender information during bare noun processing and suggests that the bilinguals’ gender ...
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The relationship between syntactic ambiguity and locality has been a reliable cornerstone in theories of language comprehension with one exception: non-local preferences in object-modifying relative clauses preceded by two potential hosts... more
The relationship between syntactic ambiguity and locality has been a reliable cornerstone in theories of language comprehension with one exception: non-local preferences in object-modifying relative clauses preceded by two potential hosts (DP1 of DP2 RC). We test the offline and online effects of the availability of an alternative structure, the pseudo-relative, on the parsing of relative clauses. It has been claimed that pseudo-relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their simplicity at the structural, interpretive and pragmatic levels, and act as a confound in the attachment literature (Grillo, 2012; Grillo & Costa, 2014). Our results show that attachment preferences are modulated by the availability of pseudo-relatives in offline and online tests. However , when this factor is controlled, parsing of relative clauses in Spanish is initially ruled by principles of locality , which can eventually be overridden by other factors.
In the present study we examined electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of ambiguous word processing. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with ambiguous words with unrelated meanings (i.e., homonyms; e.g.,... more
In the present study we examined electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of ambiguous word processing. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with ambiguous words with unrelated meanings (i.e., homonyms; e.g., bat), ambiguous words with related meanings (i.e., polysemes; e.g., newspaper), and unambiguous words (e.g., guitar). Ambiguous words elicited larger N400 amplitudes than unambiguous words and showed an advantage in RTs. Importantly, no differences were found between homonyms and polysemes, on either N400 amplitudes or in RTs. These results suggest that ambiguous words, regardless of the relatedness between their meanings, benefit from enhanced semantic activation in comparison to unambiguous words during word recognition.
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In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the... more
In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the effects of two variables related to word-type. We tested proficient unbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked translation priming paradigm conducted in the two translation directions (L1 to L2, and L2 to L1), by orthogonally manipulating for the first time concreteness and cognate status. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was also manipulated (50 ms vs 100 ms). Results revealed modulations in masked priming effects as a function of cognate status and translation direction. However, the effect of concreteness was only observed at the long SOA. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant models of bilingual memory, mainly the Distributed Feature Model (de Groot, 1992a).
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Previous behavioral findings showed that pairs of words that are highly related in meaning across two languages and pairs in which the second word is related in lexical form to the correct translation of the first one produce... more
Previous behavioral findings showed that pairs of words that are highly related in meaning
across two languages and pairs in which the second word is related in lexical form to the
correct translation of the first one produce interference effects when highly proficient
balanced bilinguals perform a translation recognition task (Ferre, Sanchez-Casas, &
Guasch, 2006; Moldovan, Sanchez-Casas, Demestre, & Ferre, 2012). In contrast, interference
effects were not observed when the two words were less related in meaning. The lack
of interference with less related words could be explained by the fact that the level of
activation of the corresponding semantic representations is too low so as to produce
interference at the time the translation decision has to be made. Moreover, behavioral
measures might be not sensitive enough to capture the activation of such representations.
In the present study, highly proficient balanced CatalaneSpanish bilinguals performed a
translation recognition task in which a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, i.e., 250 ms)
was used and event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. There were three critical
conditions: pairs of words highly related in meaning, pairs of words less related in
meaning, and pairs in which the second word was similar in lexical form to the correct
translation of the first word. Behavioral results showed interference effects in all conditions.
ERPs revealed modulations of the N400 for the two semantic conditions, and
modulations of the LPC for the form condition. These results reveal that when short SOAs
and sensitive measures are used, interference effects with words less related in meaning
are obtained as well. In addition, these findings suggest that meaning is accessed before
the translation equivalent becomes available, that is, highly proficient balanced bilinguals
can directly access the conceptual system from both of their languages.
across two languages and pairs in which the second word is related in lexical form to the
correct translation of the first one produce interference effects when highly proficient
balanced bilinguals perform a translation recognition task (Ferre, Sanchez-Casas, &
Guasch, 2006; Moldovan, Sanchez-Casas, Demestre, & Ferre, 2012). In contrast, interference
effects were not observed when the two words were less related in meaning. The lack
of interference with less related words could be explained by the fact that the level of
activation of the corresponding semantic representations is too low so as to produce
interference at the time the translation decision has to be made. Moreover, behavioral
measures might be not sensitive enough to capture the activation of such representations.
In the present study, highly proficient balanced CatalaneSpanish bilinguals performed a
translation recognition task in which a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, i.e., 250 ms)
was used and event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. There were three critical
conditions: pairs of words highly related in meaning, pairs of words less related in
meaning, and pairs in which the second word was similar in lexical form to the correct
translation of the first word. Behavioral results showed interference effects in all conditions.
ERPs revealed modulations of the N400 for the two semantic conditions, and
modulations of the LPC for the form condition. These results reveal that when short SOAs
and sensitive measures are used, interference effects with words less related in meaning
are obtained as well. In addition, these findings suggest that meaning is accessed before
the translation equivalent becomes available, that is, highly proficient balanced bilinguals
can directly access the conceptual system from both of their languages.