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ABSTRACT: Contrary to what occurs with negative pictures, negative words are, in general, not capable of interfering with performance in ongoing cognitive tasks in normal subjects. A probable explanation is the limited arousing power of linguistic material. Especially intense words (insults and compliments), neutral personal adjectives, and pseudowords were presented to 28 participants while they executed a lexical decision task. Insults were associated with the poorest performance in the task and compliments with the best. Amplitude of the late positive component of the event-related potentials, originating at parietal areas, was maximal in response to compliments and insults, but latencies were delayed in response to the latter. Results suggest that intense emotional words modulate ongoing cognitive processes through both bottom-up (attentional capture by insults) and top-down (facilitation of cognitive processing by arousing words) mechanisms.
Psychophysiology 04/2008; 45(2):188-96. · 3.29 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The four experiments reported in this paper were designed to determine to what extent words are lexically represented in terms of their morphological structure. The experiments are carried out in Spanish, a language with rich morphological resources, using a priming paradigm and a lexical decision task. In particular, they examined the pattern of priming effects in regular inflected words with gender and in derived words, in comparison to those produced by orthographically and semantically related words, by manipulating form similarity and semantic transparency. The results showed, on the one hand, that regular inflected words produced reliable facilitatory effects which are not driven just by form relatedness (Experiments 1 and 2). On the other hand, they showed that both transparent and nontransparent derived forms produced facilitatory effects distinct from purely orthographic and semantic effects (Experiments 3 and 4). In general, these findings suggest that morphological information is represented in the mental lexicon and may play a central role in the individuation and retrieval of lexical entries.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 12/2003; 32(6):621-68. · 0.59 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: The present study focuses on the relationship between the processes of lexical retrieval and phonological encoding in sentence production. An analysis of spontaneous slips of the tongue in Spanish reveals that (1) there is as yet no clear evidence for a lexical bias effect on sublexical errors (segment movement and substitution), and hence for positive feedback from phonological encoding to the level of lexical representation; and (2) meaning and form appear to be largely dissociated in lexical errors, which lends support to the hypothesis that lexical retrieval proceeds in two independent stages during sentence production. These findings are discussed in the light of two alternative accounts of language production mechanisms: the interactive activation model and the structural, processing-stages model.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 01/1991; 20(3):161-185. · 0.59 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: From a corpus of 3,530 slips of the tongue in Spanish, a sample of 753 cases of movement errors was analyzed, comprising those tokens that could be unambiguously assigned to the major categories of anticipations, perseverations, exchanges, and shifts. The analysis was performed according to two main criteria: (a) the degree of correspondence between the linguistic elements interacting in an error, and (b) the distance between such elements in terms of the type and number of the intervening linguistic boundaries. The results of this analysis converge with those obtained in English, supporting a model of sentence planning with different levels of representation and processing. Furthermore, Spanish provides a clear case to attest the role of syllabic structure in production processes, the constraints set by word boundaries in sublexical errors, and the contribution of inflectional suffixes to the assignment of grammatical category to the root morphemes.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 12/1988; 18(1):145-161. · 0.59 Impact Factor
