Emotional Attractors in Subject-Verb Number Agreement

Considering the crosstalk between brain networks that contain linguistic and emotional information and that no studies have examined the impact of semantic information of affective nature on subject-verb number agreement, the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study investigated the extent to which emotional local nouns whose number mismatched that of subject head nouns might be considered by the parser during comprehension of grammatically correct sentences. To this end, twenty-eight Spanish native speakers were tested on a self-paced reading task while their brain activity was recorded. The experimental materials consisted of 120 sentences where the valence (negative vs. neutral) and number (singular vs. plural) of the local noun of the singular subject noun-phrase (NP) were manipulated; El gorro de aquel/aquellos cazador(es)/mecanico(s) era horizontal ellipsis [The hat of that/those hunter(s)/mechanic(s) was horizontal ellipsis ]. ERP results measured in the local noun position showed that valence and number interacted in the 300-500 ms (negative component) and 780-880 ms (late positivity) time windows. In the (target) verb position, the two factors only interacted in the late 780-880 ms time window, revealing an "ungrammatical illusion" for plural marked neutral words. Our findings suggest that number agreement is sensitive to affective meaning but that the emotional information of an attractor is considered in different operations and at different stages during grammatical sentence processing; it can affect lexical and syntactic representation retrieval of a subject-NP and impact agreement encoding only at late stages of processing, during verb agreement and feature integration.Funding This work was supported by the Special Account for Research Grants (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (grant numbers PGC2018-097970-B-I00 and RED2018- 102615-T), and the Basque Government (grant number IT1169-19)

On The Nature Of Clitics And Their Sensitivity To Number Attraction Effects

Pronominal dependencies have been shown to be more resilient to attraction effects than subject-verb agreement. We use this phenomenon to investigate whether antecedent-clitic dependencies in Spanish are computed like agreement or like pronominal dependencies. In Experiment 1, an acceptability judgment self-paced reading task was used. Accuracy data yielded reliable attraction effects in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, only in singular (but not plural) clitics. Reading times did not show reliable attraction effects. In Experiment 2, we measured electrophysiological responses to violations, which elicited a biphasic frontal negativity-P600 pattern. Number attraction modulated the frontal negativity but not the amplitude of the P600 component. This differs from ERP findings on subject-verb agreement, since when the baseline matching condition obtained a biphasic pattern, attraction effects only modulated the P600, not the preceding negativity. We argue that these findings support cue-retrieval accounts of dependency resolution and further suggest that the sensitivity to attraction effects shown by clitics resembles more the computation of pronominal dependencies than that of agreement.This research has been supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (FFI2014-55733-P; FFI2015-64183-P; RYC-2010-06520, RYC-2013-14722), and the Basque Government (IT665-13)

Language as a cue for social categorization in bilingual communities

This registered report article investigates the role of language as a dimension of social categorization. Our critical aim was to investigate whether categorization based on language occurs even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic context, as is the case in bilingual communities. Bilingual individuals of two bilingual communities, the Basque Country (Spain) and Veneto (Italy), were tested using the memory confusion paradigm in a 'Who said what?' task. In the encoding part of the task, participants were presented with different faces together with auditory sentences. Two different languages of the sentences were presented in each study, with half of the faces always associated with one language and the other half with the other language. Spanish and Basque languages were used in Study 1, and Italian and Venetian dialect in Study 2. In the test phase, the auditory sentences were presented again and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. As expected, participants error rates were high. Critically, participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other (different) language category. The results indicate that bilinguals categorize individuals belonging to the same sociolinguistic community based on the language these individuals speak, suggesting that social categorization based on language is an automatic process.AL is supported by a PhD grant for the research theme "Bilinguismo e scelte ambientali. Comprendere l’impatto della lingua sulle decisioni utilizzando il bilinguismo italiano-veneto" from the Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione,University of Padova. MS is supported by grants PGC2018-097970-B-I00 and RED2018-102615-T funded by NCIN/AEI (Spanish Government) and by the Basque Government (IT1169-19). CB is supported by the Ramón y Cajal research program (RYC2018-026174). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study

The impact of early bilingualism on controlling a language learned late: an ERP study

This study asks whether early bilingual speakers who have already developed a language control mechanism to handle two languages control a dominant and a late acquired language in the same way as late bilingual speakers. We therefore, compared event-related potentials in a language switching task in two groups of participants switching between a dominant (L1) and a weak late acquired language (L3). Early bilingual late learners of an L3 showed a different ERP pattern (larger N2 mean amplitude) as late bilingual late learners of an L3. Even though the relative strength of languages was similar in both groups (a dominant and a weak late acquired language), they controlled their language output in a different manner. Moreover, the N2 was similar in two groups of early bilinguals tested in languages of different strength. We conclude that early bilingual learners of an L3 do not control languages in the same way as late bilingual L3 learners -who have not achieved native-like proficiency in their L2- do. This difference might explain some of the advantages early bilinguals have when learning new languages

The Multilingual Picture Database

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.Peer reviewe

Caracterización de una estructura tipo sándwich Aluminio_lana_aluminio

La necesidad de elaborar un modelo matemático para la predicción del aislamiento acústico de particiones de más de una capa (particiones multicapa).García Santesteban, YM. (2009). Caracterización de una estructura tipo sándwich Aluminio_lana_aluminio. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/85394Archivo delegad