Cristina Baus

• PhD
• Ramon y Cajal researchers at University of Barcelona

The present study aimed to assess the extent to which human participants co-represent the lexico-semantic processing of a humanoid robot partner. Specifically, we investigated whether participants would engage their speech production system to predict the robot’s upcoming words, and how they would progressively adapt to the robot’s verbal behavior....

The present study aimed to investigate the neural changes related to the early stages of sign language vocabulary learning. Hearing non-signers were exposed to Catalan Sign Language (LSC) signs in three laboratory learning sessions over the course of a week. Participants completed two priming tasks designed to examine learning-related neural change...

Cortical tracking, the synchronization of brain activity to linguistic rhythms is a well-established phenomenon. However, its nature has been heavily contested: is it purely epiphenomenal or does it play a fundamental role in speech comprehension? Previous research has used intelligibility manipulations to examine this topic. Here, we instead varie...

This study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Brain Research, 1609(1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres....

When encountering people, their faces are usually paired with their voices. We know that if the face looks familiar, and the voice is high-pitched, the first impression will be positive and trustworthy. But, how do we integrate these two multisensory physical attributes? Here, we explore 1) the automaticity of audiovisual integration in shaping fir...

Professor Albert Costa (1972-2018) was one of the most influential scholars in the fields of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. This book provides a faithful look at the most relevant lines of research in which he worked during his academic career. Written by some of his close collaborators and friends, the book presents a coherent summary of the...

Suppose we are good tennis players and want to learn to play ping-pong. Does the way we play tennis affect how we play ping-pong? Would we play ping-pong in the same way if we were not tennis experts? This was one of Albert’s recurring metaphors when drawing a line of thought toward language interactions in bilingual language processing. The argume...

It is well documented a bias in memory recognition when participants have to decide whether they have seen a person before that belongs to a different ethnic group. At the same time, the language of a speaker influences the perception of their face. Recent evidence suggests that language and race interact in creating social categories. Here, we exp...

We investigated indexical variation as a variable that promotes second language (L2) vocabulary learning across language modalities. In three experiments, we presented Catalan Sign Language signs (Experiments 1a and 1b), pseudowords (Experiment 2), and English words (Experiment 3) to participants in three conditions that varied in the number of peo...

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 communi...

In this study we investigated whether people conceptually align when performing a language task together with a robot. In a joint picture-naming task, 24 French native speakers took turns with a robot in naming images of objects belonging to fifteen different semantic categories. For a subset of those semantic categories, the robot was programmed t...

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,...

How does prior linguistic knowledge modulate learning in verbal auditory statistical learning (SL) tasks? Here, we address this question by assessing to what extent the frequency of syllabic co‐occurrences in the learners’ native language determines SL performance. We computed the frequency of co‐occurrences of syllables in spoken Spanish through a...

The present study explored the influence of iconicity on sign lexical retrieval and whether it is modulated by the task at hand. Lexical frequency was also manipulated to have an index of lexical processing during sign production. Behavioural and electrophysiological measures (ERPs) were collected from 22 Deaf bimodal bilinguals while performing a...

The present pre-registration aims to investigate the role of language as a dimension of social categorization. Our critical aim is to investigate whether language can be used as a dimension of social categorization even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic group, as is the case in bilingual communities where two languages are...

Two experimental studies were conducted to replicate the effect found by Baus et al. where language as a marker of social categories affected recognition of faces in an old/new paradigm. In Study 1, we presented faces along with utterances in Swedish and in English to native Swedish speakers. Faces presented along with Swedish utterances were not r...

Does language categorization influence face identification? The present study addressed this question by means of two experiments. First, to establish language categorization of faces, the memory confusion paradigm was used to create two language categories of faces, Spanish and English. Subsequently, participants underwent an oddball paradigm, in...

The present study explored the influence of iconicity on sign lexical retrieval and whether its influence is modulated depending on the type of stimuli employed in the task. Lexical frequency was also included as a control variable indexing lexical processing. Behavioural and electrophysiological measures (ERPs) were collected from 22 Deaf bimodal...

Conversation entails a tight coordination between the interlocutors in terms of co-representation and linguistic alignment (e.g., word choices). In this study we investigated whether people conceptually align in a language task with a robot. 24 French native speakers alternated with an artificial partner in naming images of objects belonging to dif...

To investigate cross-linguistic interactions in bimodal bilingual production, behavioural and electrophysiological measures (ERPs) were recorded from 24 deaf bimodal bilinguals while naming pictures in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Two tasks were employed, a picture-word interference and a picture-picture interference task. Cross-linguistic effects...

The present study aimed to explore the bilingual disadvantage in the course of speech production by comparing the naming performance and the temporal dynamics of object naming in three groups of participants: monolinguals, L1 bilinguals and L2 bilinguals. To determine the origin of the bilingual disadvantage, whether lexical or post-lexical, we man...

Speakers learning a second language show systematic differences from native speakers in the retrieval, planning, and articulation of speech. A key challenge in examining the interrelationship between these differences at various stages of production is the need for manual annotation of fine-grained properties of speech. We introduce a new method fo...

The aim of the present study was to explore cross-linguistic interactions in language production when the language to be produced and the non-intended language are from different modalities. Concretely, we tested whether Deaf bimodal bilinguals are sensitive to oral language influences when they sign. To that end, 25 Deaf Catalan Sign Language (LSC...

The aim of the present study was to explore cross-linguistic interactions in language production when the language to be produced and the non-intended language are from different modalities. Concretely, we tested whether Deaf bimodal bilinguals are sensitive to oral language influences when they sign. To that end, 25 Deaf Catalan Sign Language (LSC...

Language mediates most of our social life and yet, despite such social relevance and ubiquity, little is known about language processing during social interactions. To explore this issue, two experiments were designed to isolate two basic components of a conversation: 1) the interplay between language production and comprehension systems, and 2) th...

Word reduction refers to how predictable words are shortened in features such as duration, intensity, or pitch. However, its origin is still unclear: Are words reduced because it is the second time that conceptual representations are activated, or because words are articulated twice? If word reduction is conceptually driven, it would be irrelevant...

Preprint: Gutierrez-Sigut, E., & Baus, C. (2019, September 23). Lexical processing in sign language comprehension and production – experimental perspectives. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/qr769 The study of sign language has received increasing interest in the last decades. Within this growing field, research on sign language processing – includ...

In the past years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people learning sign languages. For hearing second language (L2) signers, acquiring a sign language involves acquiring a new language in a different modality. Exploring how L2 sign perception is accomplished and how newly learned categories are created is the aim of the prese...

This chapter reviews current knowledge about the relationship between language control and executive control (EC) mechanisms in bilingual speakers. The most common strategy to assess the relationship between the two domains of control is to compare people's performance on control tasks that involve linguistic and non‐linguistic processes. The chapt...

We form very rapid personality impressions about speakers on hearing a single word. This implies that the acoustical properties of the voice (e.g., pitch) are very powerful cues when forming social impressions. Here, we aimed to explore how personality impressions for brief social utterances transfer across languages and whether acoustical properti...

Bilingual speakers are suggested to use control processes to avoid linguistic interference from the unintended language. It is debated whether these bilingual language control (BLC) processes are an instantiation of the more domain-general executive control (EC) processes. Previous studies inconsistently report correlations between measures of ling...

The information we obtain from how speakers sound-for example their accent-affects how we interpret the messages they convey. A clear example is foreign accented speech, where reduced intelligibility and speaker's social categorization (out-group member) affect memory and the credibility of the message (e.g., less trustworthiness). In the present s...

We explore the properties of foreigner talk through word reduction. Word reduction signals that the speaker is referring to the same entity as previously and should be preserved for foreigner talk. However, it leads to intelligibility loss, which works against foreigner talk. Pairs of speakers engaged in a task where native speakers talked either t...

Here we investigated how the language in which a person addresses us, native or foreign, influences subsequent face recognition. In an old/new paradigm, we explored the behavioral and electrophysiological activity associated with face recognition memory. Participants were first presented with faces accompanied by voices speaking either in their nat...

The present study examined whether processing words with affective connotations in a listener's native language may be modulated by accented speech. To address this question, we used the Event Related Potential (ERP) technique and recorded the cerebral activity of Spanish native listeners, who performed a semantic categorization task, while listeni...

The LSE-Sign database is a free online tool for selecting Spanish Sign Language stimulus materials to be used in experiments. It contains 2,400 individual signs taken from a recent standardized LSE dictionary, and a further 2,700 related nonsigns. Each entry is coded for a wide range of grammatical, phonological, and articulatory information, inclu...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the functional role of syllables in sign language and how the different phonological combinations influence sign production. Moreover, the influence of age of acquisition was evaluated. Deaf signers (native and non-native) of Catalan Signed Language (LSC) were asked in a picture-sign interference task...

The present study investigated whether lexical processes that occur when we name objects can also be observed when an interaction partner is naming objects. We compared the behavioral and electrophysiological responses of participants performing a conditional go/no-go picture naming task in two different conditions: individually and jointly with a...

The aim of the present study was to explore the central (e.g., lexical processing) and peripheral processes (motor preparation and execution) underlying word production during typewriting. To do so, we tested non-professional typers in a picture typing task while continuously recording EEG. Participants were instructed to write (by means of a stand...

Morphology of the human brain predicts the speed at which individuals learn to distinguish novel foreign speech sounds after laboratory training. However, little is known about the neuroanatomical basis of individual differences in speech perception when a second language (L2) has been learned in natural environments for extended periods of time. I...

We examined whether iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL) enhances translation performance for new learners and proficient signers. Fifteen hearing nonsigners and 15 proficient ASL-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task and a production translation task. Nonsigners were taught 28 ASL verbs (14 iconic; 14 non-iconic) prior t...

IntroductionLexical access in speech production: representations, processes and variablesLexical access in speech production in Spanish in bilingual contextsLanguage control in bilingual contexts (Spanish as L1 and L2): evidence from languageswitching tasksLearning Spanish in an immersion contextConclusions References

Interactive activation models of lexical access assume that the presentation of a given word activates not only its lexical representation but also those corresponding to words similar in form. Current theories are based on data from oral and written languages, and therefore signed languages represent a special challenge for existing theories of wo...

Human beings differ in their ability to master the sounds of their second language (L2). Phonetic training studies have proposed that differences in phonetic learning stem from differences in psychoacoustic abilities rather than speech-specific capabilities. We aimed at finding the origin of individual differences in L2 phonetic acquisition in natu...

In three experiments, we explore the effects of phonological properties such as neighbourhood density and frequency on speech production in Spanish. Specifically, we assess the reliability of the recent observation made by Vitevitch and Stamer (2006), according to which the neighbourhood effect in Spanish has a reverse polarity to that observed in...

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture-word interference task: native and non...

The aim of the present study is to explore the relationship between the ability to perceive L2 phonological contrasts and the ability to produce them. There are just few studies (see Flege 1995 or Flege, MacKay and Meador 1999 among others) that have addressed this issue and the results have not shown a reliable pattern. More precisely, we assess w...