Is the scope of phonological planning constrained by the syntactical role of the utterance constituents?

Five experiments looked the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of color adjective+noun phrases in English ("green gun"), or noun+color adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal color adjectives, it induced inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that these dissociation is not compatible with a genuine crosslinguistic difference in the scope of phonological encoding. Rather we explain it in terms of the interplay between an activation gradient, coding word order, and an activation bias, coding the syntactical role of the utterance constituents

The Bristol norms for age of acquisition, imageability, and familiarity

Abstract Ratings of Age-of-Acquisition (AoA), imageability, and familiarity were collected for 1,526 words. The methodology made use of a modular approach, in which the full sample of words was divided into five separate blocks. Within each block, each word was rated on each of the three variables by 20 participants (undergraduate students from the University of Bristol). Analyses comparing these ratings to existing norm databases demonstrate that this methodology resulted in high reliability (assessed by Cronbach's alpha) and validity. The ratings were also transformed to be compatible with the 3 Previous research has identified a number of variables that affect the speed and accuracy with which words can be recognised, recalled, named, and/or classified (e.g., Balota et al., 2004; Collecting norms for these subjective variables is a relatively time-consuming process, and most norming studies have been limited to the number of items that a participant can rate in one session of reasonable length. Most of the published norming studies concentrate on only one or two of the three variables that we focus on here, and typically include less than 1000 items

Investigating Gender Assignment Strategies in Mixed Purepecha–Spanish Nominal Constructions

Purepecha has no grammatical gender, whereas Spanish has a binary masculine–feminine system. In this paper we investigate how early sequential Purepecha–Spanish bilinguals assign gender to Purepecha nouns inserted into an otherwise Spanish utterance, using a director-matcher production task and an online forced-choice acceptability judgement task. The results of the production task indicate a strong preference for masculine gender, irrespective of the gender of the noun’s translation equivalent, the so-called “masculine default” option. Participants in the comprehension task were influenced by the orthography of the Purepecha noun in the -a ending condition, leading them to assign feminine gender agreement to nouns that are masculine in Spanish, but preferred the masculine default strategy again in the -i/-u ending condition. The absence of the “analogical criterion” in both tasks contrasts with the results of some previous studies, underlining the need for more comparable data in terms of task type. Our results also highlight how task type can influence the choices speakers make, in this context, in terms of the choice of grammatical gender agreement strategy. Task type should therefore be carefully controlled in future studies

When Your Partner Cheats: Financial Infidelity in Committed Couples

The present study evaluated the affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses of 203 participants who were queried about their romantic partners’ potential financial infidelity as well as their own. Results were analyzed through the lens of the ABC model (affect, behavior, cognition) and indicated that participants would be much more upset and less accepting if their romantic partner: filed for bankruptcy without their partner’s knowledge, gambled away money without telling their partner, lied to cover up a debt, kept a secret account, took out savings without consulting their partner, spent money on pornographic material without telling their partners, hid credit card statements, or kept a raise or a bonus secret. Further, the only behavior that elicited a willingness to leave the relationship was filing for bankruptcy without informing the romantic partner. Clinical implications and future research directions are also discussed

Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words

Most current models of research on emotion recognize valence (how pleasant a stimulus is) and arousal (the level of activation or intensity that a stimulus elicits) as important components in the classification of affective experiences (Barrett, 1998; Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Barrett, 2012). Here we present a set of norms for valence and arousal for a very large set of Spanish words, including items from a variety of frequencies, semantic categories, and parts of speech, including a subset of conjugated verbs. In this regard, we found that there were significant but very small differences between the ratings for conjugations of the same verb, validating the practice of applying the ratings for infinitives to all derived forms of the verb. Our norms show a high degree of reliability and are strongly correlated with those of Redondo, Fraga, Padron, and Comesana's (2007) Spanish version of the influential Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999), as well as those from Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (2013), the largest available set of emotional norms for English words. Additionally, we included measures of word prevalence-that is, the percentage of participants that knew a particular word-for each variable (Keuleers, Stevens, Mandera, & Brysbaert, 2015). Our large set of norms in Spanish not only will facilitate the creation of stimuli and the analysis of texts in that language, but also will be useful for cross-language comparisons and research on emotional aspects of bilingualism. The norms can be downloaded and available as a supplementary materials to this article

Financial Infidelity in Couple Relationships

Four hundred and fourteen participants answered questions regarding financial habits within the context of the couple relationship. The Big Five Personality Inventory and a Martial and Life Satisfaction Scale were used to determine the incidence and factors associated with financial infidelity. Results indicated that 27% of participants have kept a financial secret from their partner. Furthermore, both marital and life satisfaction were lower for participants who have experienced financial infidelity than in those who have not. Finally, conscientiousness, a factor from the Big Five Personality Inventory, showed a significant difference, suggesting that more organized individuals were less likely to keep financial secrets. Clinical implications are also discussed

Using two-alternative force choice tasks and Thurstone's law of comparative judgments for code-switching research

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone's law of comparative judgments (Thurstone, 1927) are well suited to investigate code-switching competence by means of acceptability judgments. We compare this method with commonly used Likert scale judgments and find that the 2-alternative forced choice task provides granular details that remain invisible in a Likert scale experiment. In order to compare and contrast both methods, we examined the syntactic phenomenon usually referred to as the Adjacency Condition (AC) (apud Stowell, 1981), which imposes a condition of adjacency between verb and object. Our interest in the AC comes from the fact that it is a subtle feature of English grammar which is absent in Spanish, and this provides an excellent springboard to create minimal code-switched pairs that allow us to formulate a clear research question that can be tested using both methods

Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth