Cristina Izura

• Swansea University

Words learned first or earlier in life are processed faster, with more accuracy, and are more resistant to brain injury than words learned some time later. This phenomenon is called the age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect. Current accounts of the AoA effect place its influence in the semantic system (i.e., the semantic hypothesis), or in the irregular...

Cognitive performance declines with age following different trajectories. The cognitive trade-off, however, between age and cognitive reserve is still not clear. In addition, bilingualism has been thought to play a role in delaying cognitive decline by affecting cognitive control outside the scope of language. However, the effect has been unreliabl...

Background: Internet-initiated sexual offences against minors (i.e., online grooming (OG)) is a communicative process of entrapment used by adults to entice minors into sexual activities. Yet, research exploring how the language used by such individuals might reflect their psychological world is scarce. Interestingly, researchers have largely assu...

This study investigates gender differences in children’s linguistic development of Spanish past tense verbs. Two groups of 30 children, each consisting of 15 girls and 15 boys, were studied: Preschool children (5 years old) and 1 st grade (7 years old). Participants carried out an elicitation task where a verbal change from present to past tense wa...

Data presented within this article supports the findings of the manuscript “A systematic review of fantasy driven vs contact driven internet-initiated sexual offences: Discrete or overlapping typologies?” (Broome, Izura, & Lorenzo-Dus, in press). Inclusion and Exclusion criteria of study selection, PICO Formulation of Study Appraisal, as well as th...

Within the literature individuals who use the internet to facilitate the sexual abuse of a minor are generally classified as being fantasy or contact driven. Classification is based upon the intended location for sexual climax: fantasy driven individuals aim to reach sexual climax online, whereas contact driven individuals target minors to achieve...

This study examines the factors affecting word recognition in a language with a consistent system to map letters into sounds; Spanish. The influence of semantics on the recognition of words in languages with inconsistent mappings, such as English, is well documented. Not much is known for other languages. A lexical decision task and two category ve...

Although many types of newly encoded information can be consolidated during sleep, an enhanced effect has been found for memories tagged as relevant to the future, such as through knowledge of future testing or payment for successful recall. In the current study, participants (n = 80) learned Welsh and Breton translations of English words, and intr...

Online Grooming is the process whereby an adult gains the trust of a minor in order to exploit him/her, through the use of cyber-technology. Despite a global increase in online sexual exploitation, research into online grooming is scant, especially from a linguistic perspective. Our study examines online groomers’ attempts at gaining their targets’...

Online grooming affects a significant number of children and teenagers. Yet research into its characteristics is scarce. This study uses a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis approach (Herring, 2004, 2013) in order to examine a corpus of online grooming chat logs (c. 75,000 words) from Perverted-Justice.com. Results reveal the following idiosyncra...

The extent to which processing words involves breaking them down into smaller units or morphemes or is the result of an interactive activation of other units, such as meanings, letters, and sounds (e.g., dis-agree-ment vs. disagreement), is currently under debate. Disentangling morphology from phonology and semantics is often a methodological chall...

Abstract A large body of research has examined the factors which affect the speed with which words are recognised in lexical decision tasks. Nothing has yet been reported concerning the important factors in differentiating acronyms (e.g. BBC, HIV, NASA) from non-words. It appears that this task poses little problem for skilled readers, in spite of...

Background: Within dual-route models of reading, words with regular spelling to sound correspondences can be read successfully using lexical or nonlexical reading processes. Research has indicated that which of these pathways is used is influenced by the other items that form the presentation context.Aims: We extend these findings using acronym sti...

Previous research has shown that lexical availability is a complex property in-fluenced by factors such as typicality, age of acquisition and concept familiarity (Hernández, Izura and Ellis 2006). The influence of these factors might change in second languages (L2) due to variations in age of learning, motivation, learning processes, and experience...

The orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) refers to the first letter of a word that, reading from left to right, makes the word unique. It has recently been proposed that OUPs might be relevant in word recognition and their influence could inform the long-lasting debate of whether – and to what extent – printed words are recognized serially or in par...

The methods to measure vocabulary size vary across disciplines. This heterogeneity hinders direct comparisons between studies and slows down the understanding of research findings. A quick, free and efficient test of English language proficiency, LexTALE, was recently developed to remedy this problem. LexTALE has been validated and shown to be an e...

Poster Presentation

In this chapter we describe some ways in which cognitive tasks used in psycholinguistics research can be used to assess the language skills of bilingual speakers. We present a description of the processes involved in picture naming, visual lexical decision and word categorization tasks, and some applications of the tasks for assessing the different...

Ten years ago, at the age of 65, my father decided to learn English as a second language.

In spite of their unusual orthographic and phonological form, acronyms (e.g., BBC, HIV, NATO) can become familiar to the reader, and their meaning can be accessed well enough that they are understood. The factors in semantic access for acronym stimuli were assessed using a word association task. Two analyses examined the time taken to generate a wo...

Acronyms are an idiosyncratic part of our everyday vocabulary. Research in word processing has used acronyms as a tool to answer fundamental questions such as the nature of the word superiority effect (WSE) or which is the best way to account for word-reading processes. In this study, acronym naming was assessed by looking at the influence that a n...

Word association responses in first-language (L1) Spanish and second-language (L2) English were investigated by means of response latencies and types of associative response produced. The primary aims were to establish whether (a) some response types are produced more often or faster than others, (b) participants’ L2 response time profiles mirror t...

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an ef...

Morphologically complex words

Hay palabras que vienen más rápido a la mente de los hablantes cuando se les pregunta por un determinado tema. Existen factores cognitivos que predicen esta rapidez y que nos ayudan a entender cómo funcionan los procesos de recuperación y selección del léxico.

ERP evidence for differential effects of word length in the left and right cerebral hemispheres Manipulating the length of words presented to the left and right visual fields has long been reported to elicit differing effects within each of the cerebral hemispheres (see Ellis, 2004 for a review). The basis for this observation is the fact that beha...

One of the strongest predictors of the speed with which adults can name a pictured object is the age at which the object and its name are first learned. Age of acquisition also predicts the retention or loss of individual words following brain damage in conditions like aphasia and Alzheimer's disease. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) wa...

Lexical availability measures the ease with which a word can be generated as a member of a given category. It has been developed by linguistic studies aimed, among other things, at devising a rational basis for selecting words for inclusion in dictionaries. The measure accounts for the number of people who generated a given word as a member of a de...

This study presents a database of 500 words from five semantic categories: animals, body parts, furniture, clothing, and intelligence. Each category contains 100 words, and data on lexical availability, age of acquisition, imageability, typicality, concept familiarity, written word frequency, and word length in number of syllables are provided with...

The effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages of Spanish–English bilinguals were explored using a translation judgement task in which participants decided whether or not pairs of words in the two languages were translations of each other (i.e., had the same meaning). Experiment 1 found an effect of second langu...

Twenty Spanish patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 20 matched controls were given a battery of 17 tasks involving object recognition and the spoken and written perception and production of words and non-words. The AD patients were significantly impaired on nine of the tasks. Prominent among these were tasks that involve semantic pro...

Sixteen Spanish aphasic patients named drawings of objects on three occasions. Multiple regression analyses were carried out on the naming accuracy scores. For the patient group as a whole, naming was affected by visual complexity, object familiarity, age of acquisition, and word frequency. The combination of variables predicted naming accuracy in...

Four experiments explored the age of acquisition effects in the first and second languages of dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1 (picture naming task) and Experiment 2 (lexical decision task), an age of acquisition effect was observed in a second language acquired after childhood as well as in the first language. The results sugge...

This paper deals with the construction of a behavioural questionnaire on sexual harassment. It tries to outline a method for measuring working women's vulnerability to sexual harassment and their degree of adjustment to the pattern profile constructed in this work. This pattern was obtained from scores of 42 different women. Multidimensional Scalin...