Aina Casaponsa

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Linguistics and English Language

Languages vary considerably in how they group objects into categories. For example, the word taza in Spanish can refer to either cup or mug in English, whereas glass can refer to either copa or vaso – two different types of glasses –, in Spanish. It is still debated whether such language distinctions cause differences in early perceptual processing...

"Linguistic relativity: can we think in Spanish living in a non-Hispanic environment?" The language we use to communicate with others has tight links with the way we think and how we perceive the world around us. Hence learning to think in another language involves cognitive changes that go beyond the linguistic use and command of the language. We...

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we...

How do bilingual readers of languages that have similar scripts identify a language switch? Recent behavioral and electroencephalographic results suggest that they rely on orthotactic cues to recognize the language of the words they read in ambiguous contexts. Previous research has shown that marked words with language-specific letter sequences (i....

Acquiring a second alphabetic language also entails learning a new set of orthographic rules and specific patterns of grapheme combinations (namely, the orthotactics). The present longitudinal study aims to investigate whether orthotactic sensitivity changes over the course of a second language learning programme. To this end, a group of Spanish mo...

Modern approaches to the Whorfian linguistic relativity question have reframed it from one of whether language shapes our thinking or not, to one that tries to understand the factors that contribute to the extent and nature of any observable influence of language on perception. The current paper demonstrates that such understanding is significantly...

It is commonly accepted that bilinguals access lexical representations from their two languages during language comprehension, even when they operate in a single language context. Language detection mechanisms are, thus, hypothesized to operate after the stage of lexical access during visual word recognition. However, recent studies showed reduced...

Temporal-envelope cues are essential for successful speech perception. We asked here whether training on stimuli containing temporal-envelope cues without speech content can improve the perception of spectrally-degraded (vocoded) speech in which the temporal-envelope (but not the temporal fine structure) is mainly preserved. Two groups of listeners...

The ability to conceive time is a corner stone of human cognition. It is unknown, however, whether time conceptualisation differs depending on language of operation in bilinguals. Whilst both Chinese and English cultures associate the future with the front space, some temporal expressions of Chinese involve a configuration reversal due to historic...

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Emotions are at the core of human nature. There is evidence that emotional reactivity in foreign languages compared to native languages is reduced. We explore whether this emotional distance could modulate fear conditioning, an essential mechanism for the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders. A group of participants was verbally informe...

The bilingual advantage has been subject of research repeatedly over the last decade. Many studies have supported the idea of the existence of a higher functioning in domain general cognitive abilities among bilingual samples as compared to monolingual samples. However, this idea has been recently challenged by a number of scholars, and a recent bo...

Resulta difícil estimar con precisión el porcentaje de palabras cognadas en cada combinación de lenguas, pero todo aprendiz y profesor de lenguas sabe que existen palabras de lenguas diferentes que guardan entre sí una estrecha relación formal ortográfica y fonológica y que se refieren al mismo concepto (por ejemplo, las palabras “información” y “p...

The main goal of the present study was to investigate how the degree of orthographic overlap between translation equivalents influences bilingual word recognition processes at different stages of reading development. Spanish–Basque bilingual children with ages ranging from 8 to 15 years were tested in an explicit translation recognition task with a...

How do bilinguals detect the language of the words they read? Recent electrophysiological research using the masked priming paradigm combining primes and targets from different languages has shown that bilingual readers identify the language of the words within approximately 200 milliseconds. Recent evidence shows that language-detection mechanisms...

Previous research has shown the importance of sub-lexical orthographic cues in determining the language of a given word when the two languages of a bilingual reader share the same script. In this study we explored the extent to which cross-language sub-lexical characteristics of words -measured in terms of bigram frequencies- constrain selective la...

Numerous studies have shown that the native language influences foreign word recognition and that this influence is modulated by the proficiency in the non-native language. Here we explored how the degree of reliance on cross-language similarity (as measured by the cognate facilitation effect) together with other domain-general cognitive factors co...

Does language-specific orthography help language detection and lexical access in naturalistic bilingual contexts? This study investigates how L2 orthotactic properties influence bilingual language detection in bilingual societies and the extent to which it modulates lexical access and single word processing. Language specificity of naturalistically...