Free associate norms for 139 European Portuguese words for children from different age groups

The present study presents normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words for 8-, 10- and 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: a) the percentage of associates, b) the strength of the first associate, c) the strength of the second associate, d) the distance between the first and the second associates and e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of children, ocurring at the age of 9-10 (5th grade) and remaining stable in 11-12 year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentage of associates and idiosyncratic responses as well as an increase in the strength of the first and the second associate from the 3rd grade to the 5th grade. Moreover, the comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandes, & Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, & Bajo (2000) on Spanish for a subset of common words (16 and 58, respectively) shows that the present norms fit well with previous EP data but differ from Spanish data. The normative values can be downloaded at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases or at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.This work is part of the research projects “Bilingual semantic processing: a study with cognate words by using different learning methods” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008) and “Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) through the European programs Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional (QREN) and Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (COMPETE). The authors thank Pedro Macizo for allowing us to use their normative data for 58 Spanish words with the purpose of comparison with the EP data. We also thank Isabel Padrón and Álvaro Iriarte for helping us with the classification of children’s responses as a function of syntagmatic–paradigmatic typology

To use or not to use? influences of list presentation format and working memory capacity on older adults' semantic clustering

The goal of the present study was to examine effects of list presentation format (study list presented as a whole vs. words presented briefly individually) on younger and older adults' semantic clustering of study words. Spontaneous clustering use did not differ between format conditions in either age group. Older adults spontaneously clustered to a similar extent as younger adults, evidencing no production deficiency. When clustering use was instructed, the whole-list format conditions clustered more successfully, resulting in greater recall than in the individual-words conditions, even under dual-task demands. Older adults clustered less successfully than younger adults, evidencing a utilization deficiency, with no overall recall improvements after clustering instructions in the individual-words format. Clustering interfered with performance on a simple tone-discrimination task, indicating its general cognitive resource demands; absolute interference was greater for older adults. Working memory capacity (WMC) predicted clustering success and mediated age-related reductions therein when clustering use was instructed but not for spontaneous use. WMC-clustering correlations were similar across presentation formats but adjusted means differed such that individuals at the same level of WMC clustered more successfully in the whole-list format. Beliefs about clustering difficulty correlated with its spontaneous use but did not evidence metacognitive awareness of presentation-format effects in either age group. These results suggest that a simple change in presentation format can facilitate encoding strategy use, particularly for older adults, but these benefits do not necessarily translate into spontaneous use differences. Thereby, presentation format alone cannot explain mixed findings regarding age-related differences in spontaneous clustering

Generic and updatable XML value indices covering equality and range lookups

textabstractWe describe a collection of indices for XML text, element, and attribute node values that (i) consume little storage, (ii) have low maintenance overhead, (iii) permit fast equilookup on string values, and (iv) support range-lookup on any XML typed value (e.g., double, dateTime). The equilookup string value index depends on an elaborate hash function and on an associative combination function to facilitate updates on both mixed-content and element nodes. We also present techniques for creating range-lookup indices supporting any ordered XML typed value. These indices rely on a finite state machine that accepts the type specific language, and on a state combination table for combining states to speed-up updates. We evaluate the stability of the hash function, the storage overhead, and the indices creation and maintenance time in the context of the open-source XML database system MonetDB/XQuery