EXPRESS: Distinct Components of Stroop Interference and Facilitation: The role of phonology and response modality

Multi-stage accounts of Stroop effects suggest that Stroop effects result from different conflict and facilitation components. Consistent with these accounts, Augustinova et al. (2019) reported evidence for task, semantic and response components in Stroop effects. They also investigated how vocal and manual responses impacted the magnitude of each of the conflict and facilitation components. However, the role of phonological components in Stroop effects was not investigated in their study. The impact of phonology on Stroop effects has been observed in several studies (Besner & Stolz, 1998; Parris et al., 2019; Spinks et al., 2000). However, these studies did not investigate the role of different conflict/facilitation components in Stroop effects. To investigate the impact of phonological components as well as task, semantic, and response components on Stroop effects, a vocal and manual Stroop task was for the first time conducted with Chinese speakers using a design similar to that of Augustinova et al. (2019). The data revealed only in the vocal Stroop task phonological conflict and facilitation, whereas semantic and response conflicts were found with vocal and manual responses. Implications of the findings for response modality effects and the measures of facilitation/conflict components are discussed

The impact of spatial and verbal working memory load on semantic relatedness judgements

Studies using a relatedness judgement task have found differences between prime17 target word pairs that vary in the degree of semantic relatedness (Balota & Paul, 1996; Kuperberg et al., 2008). However, the influence of working memory load on semantic processing in this task and the role of the type of working memory task have not yet been investigated. The present study therefore investigated for the first time the effect of working memory load (low vs. high) and working memory type (verbal vs. spatial) on semantic relatedness judgements. Semantically strongly related (e.g. hip – KNEE), weakly related (e.g. muscle – KNEE) and unrelated (e.g. office – KNEE) Polish word pairs were presented in an experiment involving a dual working memory and semantic relatedness task. The data revealed that, relative to semantically unrelated word pairs, responses were faster for strongly related pairs but slower for weakly related pairs. Importantly, the verbal working memory task decreased facilitation for strongly related pairs and increased inhibition for weakly related pairs relative to the spatial working memory task. Furthermore, working memory load impacted only weakly related pairs in the verbal but not in the spatial working memory task. These results show that working memory type and load influence semantic relatedness judgements, but the direction and size of the impact depend on the strength of semantic relation

The Influence of Cross-Language Similarity on within- and between-Language Stroop Effects in Trilinguals

This study investigated effects of cross-language similarity on within- and between-language Stroop interference and facilitation in three groups of trilinguals. Trilinguals were either proficient in three languages that use the same-script (alphabetic in German–English–Dutch trilinguals), two similar scripts and one different script (Chinese and alphabetic scripts in Chinese–English–Malay trilinguals), or three completely different scripts (Arabic, Chinese, and alphabetic in Uyghur–Chinese–English trilinguals). The results revealed a similar magnitude of within-language Stroop interference for the three groups, whereas between-language interference was modulated by cross-language similarity. For the same-script trilinguals, the within- and between-language interference was similar, whereas the between-language Stroop interference was reduced for trilinguals with languages written in different scripts. The magnitude of within-language Stroop facilitation was similar across the three groups of trilinguals, but smaller than within-language Stroop interference. Between-language Stroop facilitation was also modulated by cross-language similarity such that these effects became negative for trilinguals with languages written in different scripts. The overall pattern of Stroop interference and facilitation effects can be explained in terms of diverging and converging color and word information across languages

Where do children look when watching videos with same-language subtitles?

Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this study, we investigated the extent to which primary-school children pay attention to and read subtitles and whether this is related to their reading proficiency. We tracked the eye movements of 180 British children in Years 1 to 6 who watched videos with and without subtitles. Results showed that attention to subtitles was associated with reading proficiency: Superior readers were more likely to look at subtitles than less proficient readers and spent more time on them. When children looked at words in the subtitles, they showed evidence of reading them. We conclude that some degree of reading fluency may be necessary before children pay attention to subtitles. However, by the third or fourth year of reading instruction, most children read sufficiently quickly to follow same-language subtitles and potentially learn from them

Revisiting the Neighborhood: How L2 Proficiency and Neighborhood Manipulation Affect Bilingual Processing

We conducted three neighborhood experiments with Dutch–English bilinguals to test effects of L2 proficiency and neighborhood characteristics within and between languages. In the past 20 years, the English (L2) proficiency of this population has considerably increased. To consider the impact of this development on neighborhood effects, we conducted a strict replication of the English lexical decision (ELD) task by van Heuven et al. (1998, Experiment 4). In line with our prediction, English characteristics (neighborhood size, word and bigram frequency) dominated the word and non-word responses, while the non-words also revealed an interaction of English and Dutch neighborhood size. The prominence of English was tested again in two experiments introducing a stronger neighborhood manipulation. In ELD and progressive demasking, English items with no orthographic neighbors at all were contrasted with items having neighbors in English or Dutch (‘hermits’) only, or in both languages. In both tasks, target processing was affected strongly by the presence of English neighbors, but only weakly by Dutch neighbors. Effects are interpreted in terms of two underlying processing mechanisms: language-specific global lexical activation and lexical competition

SUBTLEX-CY: A new word frequency database for Welsh

We present SUBTLEX-CY, a new word frequency database created from a 32 million word corpus of Welsh television subtitles. An experiment comprising of a lexical decision task examined SUBTLEX-CY frequency estimates against words with inconsistent frequencies in a much smaller Welsh corpus that is often used by researchers, the Cronfa Electroneg o’r Gymraeg (CEG; Ellis et al., 2001) as well as four other Welsh word frequency databases. Words were selected that were classified as low frequency (LF) in SUBTLEX-CY and high frequency (HF) in CEG and compared to words that were classified as medium frequency (MF) in both SUBTLEX-CY and CEG. Reaction time analyses showed that HF words in CEG were responded to more slowly compared to medium frequency (MF) words, suggesting that SUBTLEX-CY corpus provides a more reliable estimate of Welsh word frequencies. The new Welsh word frequency database that also includes part-of-speech, contextual diversity, and other lexical information is freely available for research purposes on the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/9gkqm/

GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/

Chinese translation norms for 1429 English words

We present Chinese translation norms for 1429 English words. Chinese-English bilinguals (N=28) were asked to provide the first Chinese translation that came to mind for 1429 English words. The results revealed that 71% of the English words received more than one correct translation indicating the large amount of translation ambiguity when translating from English to Chinese. The relationship between translation ambiguity and word frequency, concreteness and language proficiency was investigated. Although the significant correlations were not strong, results revealed that English word frequency was positively correlated with the number of alternative translations, whereas English word concreteness was negatively correlated with the number of translations. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the number of Chinese translations was predicted by word frequency and concreteness. Furthermore, an interaction between these predictors revealed that the number of translations was more affected by word frequency for more concrete words than for less concrete words. In addition, mixed-effects modelling showed that word frequency, concreteness and English language proficiency were all significant predictors of whether or not a dominant translation was provided. Finally, correlations between the word frequencies of English words and their Chinese dominant translations were higher for translation-unambiguous pairs than for translation-ambiguous pairs. The translation norms are made available in a database together with lexical information about the words, which will be a useful resource for researchers investigating Chinese-English bilingual language processing