Advantage for Emotional Words in Immediate aud Delayed Memory Tasks: Could it be Explained in Terms of Processing Capacity.

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Memories of the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001: A Study of the Consistency and Phenomenal Characteristics of Flashbulb Memories

In this study, I investigated students’ memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, carried out by Al Qaeda terrorists against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Participants completed on two occasions (2 weeks and 8 months after the events took place) a memory questionnaire that included an assessment of the phenomenal richness of their memories. The results showed that the participants remembered very well the circumstances in which they first heard about the terrorist attacks, that they were very confident about this information, and that these memories were characterized by a high phenomenal richness. Over time, there was a decrease in all of these variables, but people’s ratings of phenomenology and confidence were still very high.En este estudio se investigaron los recuerdos que tenían estudiantes de los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001, llevados a cabo por terroristas de Al Qaeda contra el World Trade Center en Nueva York y el Pentágono en Washington. En dos ocasiones diferentes (2 semanas y 8 meses después de los sucesos) los participantes rellenaron un cuestionario de memoria que incluía una evaluación de la riqueza fenomenológica de sus recuerdos. Los resultados mostraron que los participantes recordaban muy bien las circunstancias en las que se enteraron de los ataques terroristas, que tenían mucha confianza en esta información, y que estos recuerdos se caracterizaban por una gran riqueza fenomenológica. Con el paso del tiempo, había un decremento en todas estas variables pero las valoraciones de las personas de la fenomenología y la confianza se mantenían muy altas

On soft/hard handoff for packet data services in cellular CDMA mobiles systems

Benefits of macrodiversity operation for packet data services in third generation mobile systems are not obvious. Retransmission procedures to enhance link performance and higher downlink bandwidth requirements could question macrodiversity usage. This paper describes a simple methodology to compare soft and hard handoff performance in terms of transmission delay for packet data services. The handover procedures are based exclusively on power criteria and hysteresis margins.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Multiple slot allocation for voice/data transmission over PRMA++ applied to FRAMES multiple access mode 1

This paper presents some simulation results of PRMA++ for voice and data transmission over a physical air interface platform defined in the ACTS European project FRAMES. Variations on the statistics of speech sources (activity factor, petition rate) are studied and conclusions are obtained for optimal frame dimensioning. For data transmission, a multiple slot allocation scheme is presented and results are shown for different source rates and packet lengths.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Va sortir el català amb la diàspora dels jueus de Catalunya el 1492?

En aquesta aportació tractem d'esbrinar si la llengua catalana va ésser una llengua parlada a la diàspora desprès de l'expulsió dels jueus de la Península ibèrica el 1492 i el seu rastre en el judeocastellà.Did Catalan Accompany the Jewish Diaspora from Catalonia in 1492? In this study, we will try to discover whether Catalan was a spoken language among the Sephardim in the Diaspora after the Expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, and its traces in Judeo-Spanish

Gender congruency between languages influence second-language comprehension: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

In the present study we explore whether gender congruency between languages modulates bilinguals’ access to their second language words presented in isolation. We predicted that accessing L2 words that have a different gender across languages (gender-incongruent) would be more costly and require more effort than accessing same-gender words (gender-congruent) due to language co-activation, even when no access to L1 was required to perform the task. Additionally, we intended to shed some light into the mechanism underlying the gender congruency effect. To these aims, we compared the performance of Spanish native speakers with that of Italian-Spanish bilinguals (Italian native speakers) during a lexical decision task. The participants saw Spanish words that were gender-congruent and gender-incongruent between languages while event related potentials were recorded. Moreover, as an additional manipulation, we selected nouns that in both languages could be ambiguous or unambiguous. With the aim to examine whether the underlying mechanism is activation of multiple information during word processing, we focused on the N400 component, related with the effort to integrate lexical-semantic information: higher N400 amplitudes indicate greater effort. According to our prediction, Italian-Spanish bilinguals produced more errors and evoked larger N400 amplitudes when accessing gender-incongruent than gender-congruent words, while no differences appeared for Spanish native speakers between conditions. These results indicate that gender-incongruent words are harder to integrate compared with gender-congruent words, and that bilinguals automatically activate the grammatical gender of both languages during L2 language comprehension. Nevertheless, the results do not seem to support the assumption of a similar mechanism responsible for the gender congruency and the ambiguity effects. In short, the gender-congruency effect seems to originate due to activation of multiple information at the lexical level which generates difficulties to integrate at the semantic level during word access.This work has been supported by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RED2018-102615-T), by Feder Andalucía (A-SEJ-416-UGR20) to D.P., by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-111359 GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili to P. F. (2019PFR-URV-B2-32). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA

Processing of emotional words in bilinguals: Testing the effects of word concreteness, task type and language status

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion context, and who still live in such a context, performed an affective decision task (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 2) in both Catalan and Spanish. A different set of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, who were proficient in English and who learned English after early childhood in an instructional setting, performed a lexical decision task in both Spanish and English (Experiment 3). In both tasks administered throughout the experiments, the experimental stimuli were concrete and abstract words that varied in their emotional connotation (i.e. positive, negative and neutral words) and were presented in the two languages involved. In the affective decision task, participants decided if the words had emotional content or not, and in the lexical decision task they decided if the strings of letters were real words or not. The three experiments also included an unexpected free recall task. Results showed that the emotional content of words affected bilinguals’ performance in all three tasks. In particular, there was a disadvantage in processing for negative words in both the affective and lexical decision tasks, and an advantage for positive words in the lexical decision and free recall tasks. Importantly, language only interacted with the other variables in Experiment 3, suggesting that language status is a relevant factor in determining the extent to which emotional processing has the same characteristics in the two languages

Sefarad ¿la «patria» de los sefardíes?

During the 20th Century and the early years of the 21st, various studies have been published in different countries, concerning the question of a definitive homeland for the Sephardic Jews. Autobiographical reminiscenses and novels and oral testimonies have all been concerned with this topic. In the present study the author analyzes the information provided by these writings and the countries Sephardic Jews consider to be their Homeland.A lo largo del siglo XX y en lo que va del XXI se han publicado en diferentes países centenares de libros de memorias, novelas autobiográficas y testimonios de historia oral de judíos sefardíes. Tema recurrente en su discurso es la reflexión acerca de cuál sea su «patria». En este estudio analizamos qué nos dicen al respecto y cuál consideran ellos su «patria»

En «clavemanía»: ¿Dónde están las llaves de… Sefarad?

This paper aims to contribute to clarify the appearance of a growing number of «keys» from the houses that the Sephardic ancestors possessed in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion of 1492, rebuilding the data relying on newspapers and writings from various kinds.Este artículo pretende contribuir a esclarecer el auge de la aparición de tantas «llaves» de las casas que los antepasados de los sefardíes poseían en la Península Ibérica antes de la expulsión de 1492, reconstruyendo los datos extraídos de periódicos y escritos de diversa índole a través de los siglos