Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez

Benedictine College · Psychological Sciences

This study examines how we encode in language an aspect of motion that has gained little attention – the differentiation of Figure and Ground in a motion event. We examine how twenty-eight Dutch and English speakers describe and recall events that involve moveable Figures and Grounds, where the roles of the objects in the event are reversible. The...

Objectives/research questions We examined stative and eventive passive bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) in Spanish/English code-switching. Of particular interest to us was the availability of passivization in bilingual eventive passive hacer “do” constructions, purportedly banned in bilingual speech due to a universal syntactic restriction. Methodo...

This study examines the distinction between knowing the meaning of a word and experiencing the feelings associated with it. We collected affective ratings for a set of emotional and neutral English words from a group of English native speakers and a group of European Portuguese–English bilinguals. Half of the emotional words named emotions (emotion...

In early studies, code-switches between a subject pronoun and a finite verb were considered highly dispreferred or even impossible. However, naturalistic data from several language pairs has since highlighted that such switches are possible, although their grammaticality is constrained by the typology of the pronouns involved. In this study, we tes...

We present EmoPro, a normative study of the emotion lexicon of the Spanish language. We provide emotional prototypicality ratings for 1286 emotion words (i.e., those that refer to human emotions such as “fear” or “happy”), belonging to different grammatical categories. This is the largest data set for this variable so far. Each word was rated by at...

Objectives/research questions We investigate two understudied bilingual compound verbs that have been attested in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, ‘ hacer + V Inf ’ and ‘ estar + V Prog ’. Specifically, we examined speakers’ intuitions vis-à-vis the acceptability and preferential use of non-canonical and canonical hacer ‘to do’ or estar ‘to...

This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological c...

Aims and Objectives This article examines semantic convergence of bilinguals’ two languages in the case of words that overlap semantically but are not fully isomorphic in meaning and application. To what extent do the type of bilingual, type of category, and relative semantic width across the languages matter? Design The primary method involves ey...

Purepecha has no grammatical gender, whereas Spanish has a binary masculine–feminine system. In this paper we investigate how early sequential Purepecha–Spanish bilinguals assign gender to Purepecha nouns inserted into an otherwise Spanish utterance, using a director-matcher production task and an online forced-choice acceptability judgement task....

Objectives/research questions We used two types of acceptability judgments to experimentally test the predictions of two theoretical models of code-switching regarding the surface realization of the determiner in nominal constructions: lexicalist approaches within the Minimalist Program (MP) versus the Bilingual NP Hypothesis within the Matrix Lang...

Objectives Spanish and English contrast in adjective–noun word order: for example, brown dress (English) vs. vestido marrón (‘dress brown’, Spanish). According to the Matrix Language model ( MLF) word order in code-switched sentences must be compatible with the word order of the matrix language, but working within the minimalist program (MP), Canto...

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal “basic” emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the larges...

This study examined Spanish-Welsh (in Patagonia) and Welsh-English (in North Wales) bilingual children’s and adults’ processing of sentences in which two noun phrases acted as arguments of a verb. The goal was to determine the relative importance of distinct cues to the identification of the subject in the bilinguals’ processing of their two langua...

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone’s law of comparative judgments (Thurstone, 1927) are well suited to investigate code-switching competence by means of acceptability judgments. We compare this method with commonly used Likert scale judgments and find that the 2-alternative forced choice task provides granular...

This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early L2 bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English (N=144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and Englis...

These studies address monolinguals' and bilinguals' processing of categories, in order to examine the relationship between concepts and linguistically encoded classes. We focus on languages that differ in their conceptual lexicalization and breadth of application, where one language has a single word (e.g., dedo in Spanish) that corresponds to two...

Most current models of research on emotion recognize valence (how pleasant a stimulus is) and arousal (the level of activation or intensity a stimulus elicits) as important components in the classification of affective experiences (Feldman Barrett, 1998; Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Feldman Barrett, 2012). Here we present a set of norms for vale...

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...

In this chapter we present the results of a study in which adult Spanish-English bilinguals completed two standardized receptive vocabulary measures, the PPVT and the TVIP. Participants also completed an extensive background questionnaire that included items probing their language experience in different domains as they were growing up, as well as...

This chapter focuses on the assessment of grammatical knowledge and abilities in end-state bilinguals. It looks at bilingual performance in Spanish and English on a test of receptive grammatical knowledge and compares it to monolingual performance, discussing possible interpretations of the similarities and differences between them. The linguistic...

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory condit...

Although it is relatively well established that access to orthographic codes in production tasks is possible via an autonomous link between meaning and spelling (e.g., Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997), the relative contribution of phonology to orthographic access remains unclear. Two experiments demonstrated persistent repetition priming in spoken...

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...

Most models of spoken production predict that shorter utterances should be initiated faster than longer ones. However, whether word-length effects in single word production exist is at present controversial. A series of experiments did not find evidence for such an effect. First, an experimental manipulation of word length in picture naming showed...

The name-picture verification task is widely used in spoken production studies to control for nonlexical differences between picture sets. In this task a word is presented first and followed, after a pause, by a picture. Participants must then make a speeded decision on whether both word and picture refer to the same object. Using regression analys...

Three experiments investigated the scope of advance planning in written production. Experiment 1 manipulated phonological factors in single word written production, and Experiments 2 and 3 did the same in the production of adjective-noun utterances. In all three experiments, effects on latencies were found which mirrored those previously documented...

Five experiments looked the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of color adjective+noun phrases in English ("green gun"), or noun+color adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal color adjectives, it induced inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that these...

Ratings of age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and familiarity were collected for 1,526 words. The methodology made use of a modular approach, in which the full sample of words was divided into five separate blocks. Within each block, each word was rated on each of the three variables by 20 participants (undergraduate students from the Universi...

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists an...

It is generally assumed that syntax is represented linguis- tically rather than conceptually, consistent with the more general view that language and thought are coded separately. This claim is widely defended on logical grounds, but it has received little experimental support. In the present study, we asked Spanish and English speakers to make sem...