The grammatical class effect is separable from the concreteness effect in language learning

Typically concrete words are learned better than abstract words (Kaushanskaya & Rechtzigel, 2012), and nouns are learned better than verbs (Kauschke & Stenneken, 2008). However, most studies on concreteness have not manipulated grammatical class (and vice versa), leaving the relationship between the two unclear. Therefore, in two experiments we examined the effects of grammatical class and concreteness simultaneously in foreign language vocabulary learning. In Experiment 1, English speakers learned ‘foreign language’ words (English pseudowords) mapped to concrete and abstract nouns and verbs. In Experiment 2, English speakers learned German words with the same procedure. Overall, the typical advantages for concrete words and nouns were observed. Hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence that the grammatical class effect is separable from the concreteness effect. This result challenges a strict concreteness-based source of noun/verb differences. The results also suggest that the influences of concreteness and grammatical class may vary across language measures and tasks

Learning the Two Translations of Translation-Ambiguous Words: Simultaneous vs. Consecutive

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Race, Culture, and Language: A SPARK-Sponsored Symposium

In this Symposium, we seek to highlight ongoing research in the cognitive sciences that addresses issues of race and cultural perception and bias, as well as linguistic diversity. These research questions are critical to ensuring that our theoretical understanding of different cognitive processes encompasses the diversity of the world we live in

Building Trust and Conducting Research with Minoritized Communities

The lack of diverse participants in our research can lead to issues of generalizability, inability to address social and health disparities, and perpetuation of stereotypes, among many other issues. For example, it became quite clear during COVID-19 in the United States, the inequities that existed in health care access and quality and disparities in health outcomes for minoritized communities. Such inequities and disparities are also found in research practice in many fields, including cognitive science. For example, research with Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations has been highlighted as problematic (Ceci, Kahan, & Braman, 2010; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), yet the inclusion of diverse participants in research remains lacking

IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEASURES OF SENSITIVITY TO VIOLATIONS IN SECOND

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the contributions of explicit and implicit processes during second language (L2) sentence comprehension. We used a L2 grammaticality judgment task (GJT) to test 20 native English speakers enrolled in the first four semesters of Spanish while recording both accuracy and ERP data. Because end-of-sentence grammaticality judgments are open to conscious inspection, we reasoned that they can be influenced by strategic processes that reflect on formal rules and therefore reflect primarily offline explicit processing. On the other hand, because ERPs are a direct reflection of online processing, they reflec