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Introduction
My main research interests are visual word recognition and syntactic processing, with a special focus on the influence of emotionality and other lexical-semantic variables in sentence processing and recall. I've been using comprehension, production and memory tasks to study language processing in monolinguals as well as bilinguals.
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January 1997 - November 2015
Publications
Publications (136)
The Multilingual Picture (MultiPic) database has been instrumental in advancing psycholinguistic research by providing standardized norms for colored images across multiple languages. However, many lesser-studied languages remain underrepresented. This study introduces the Galician MultiPic dataset, which provides norms for naming agreement and con...
In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel f...
Languages can express grammatical gender through different ortho-phonological regularities present in nouns (e.g., the cues “-o” and “-a” for the masculine and the feminine respectively in Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish). The term “gender transparency” was coined to describe these regularities (Bates et al., 1995). In gendered languages, we can he...
The emotional connotation of words is known to affect word and sentence processing. However, the when and how of the interaction between emotion and grammar are still up for debate. In this behavioural experiment, 35 female university students read noun phrases (NPs) composed by a determiner and a noun in their L1 (Spanish), and were asked to indic...
The words we use to describe emotions vary in terms of prototypicality; that is, some of these words may be more representative of the semantic category of emotion than others (e.g., anger refers more clearly to an emotion than boredom). Based on a multicomponential conception of emotions, the aim of the present study was to examine the contributio...
In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet pro...
The lexical hypothesis postulates that relevant personality traits are encoded in natural language; based on this hypothesis, trait taxonomies have been developed in numerous languages and cultures (Allport, 1937; Angleitner,1988; Brokken, 1978; Cattell, 1943; De Raad, 2008; Goldberg 1982; Norman, 1963; Ostendorf, 1990).
Objectives: This work pres...
The picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm allows us to delve into the process of lexical access in language production with great precision. It creates situations of interference between target pictures and superimposed distractor words that participants must consciously ignore to name the pictures. Yet, although the PWI paradigm has offered num...
This ERP study used a grammaticality judgement task to analyse the interface between morphosyntactic and affective processing, as well as the modulatory role of individual differences. Participants (mostly women) were presented with Spanish noun phrases (Determiner + Noun + Adjective) in which the noun and the adjective (pleasant or neutral) either...
The study of the representation and processing of grammatical gender during language production has encountered mixed results regarding which conditions must be met to observe gender effects and whether these reflect the selection of gender values or competition between elements of agreement. The answer seems to depend on the number of determiners...
The main objective of this study was to examine the moderating or buffering effect of social support (SS) perceived by university students on the psychological impact of lockdown on mental health. Specifically, a total of 826 participants (622 women) completed an online survey that included standardized measures of anxiety (Generalised Anxiety Diso...
Grammatical gender retrieval during language production has been largely addressed through the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm, with the aim of capturing the so-called gender congruency effect (GCE). In the PWI paradigm, participants name target pictures while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. The GCE shows faster responses w...
Many studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual word recognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, finding inconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words. Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicit the same beha...
This study provides psycholinguistic and affective norms for 1,252 Spanish idiomatic expressions. A total of 965 Spanish native speakers rated the idioms in 7 subjective variables: familiarity, knowledge of the expression, decomposability, literality, predictability, valence and arousal. Correlational analyses showed that familiarity has a strong p...
Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the...
There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables....
Some previous ERP studies on the interaction between emotion and morphosyntactic processing have shown emotional modulations in a left anterior negativity (LAN) indexing the early detection of agreement mismatches, whereas others have failed to report such differences. Here we examined individual differences in the morphosyntactic processing of emo...
The study of grammatical gender representation and processing during noun lexical access has raised great debates in regards of the mandatory character of agreement contexts for gender to be retrieved, and the role of morpho-phonology and gender values in gender encoding. Although results with Germanic languages suggest that agreement contexts are...
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...
An increasing number of studies have addressed the psychological impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the general population. Nevertheless, far less is known about the impact on specific populations such as university students, whose psychological vulnerability has been shown in previous research. This study sought to examine different indicators of me...
Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare th...
An increasing number of studies have addressed the psychological impact of the COVID-19 crisis in the general population. Nevertheless, far less is known about the impact in specific populations such as university students, whose psychological vulnerability has been shown in previous research. This study sought to examine different indicators of me...
Classical models of speech production (e.g., WEAVER++) state that an agreement context is necessary for the grammatical gender of a noun to be selected. Evidence supporting this comes from studies with Germanic languages using a picture-word interference paradigm (PWIP), in which participants are asked to name a picture using a target bare noun whi...
Semantically ambiguous and emotional words occur frequently in language, and the different meanings of ambiguous words can sometimes have different emotional loads. For example, the Spanish word heroína (heroin/heroine) can refer to a drug or to a woman who performs a heroic act. Because both ambiguity and emotionality affect word processing, there...
Most research on the relationship between emotion and language in children relies on the use of words whose affective properties have been assessed by adults. To overcome this limitation, in the current study we introduce SANDchild, the Spanish affective database for children. This dataset reports ratings in the valence and the arousal dimensions f...
In the study of gender representation and processing in bilinguals, two contrasting perspectives exist: integrated versus autonomous (Costa, Kovacic, Franck, & Caramazza, 2003, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 181-200). In the former, cross-linguistic interactions during the selection of grammatical gender values are expected; in the latter...
The way grammatical gender is processed during noun production in the picture-word interference paradigm (PWIP; participants have to name aloud a picture while ignoring a superimposed distractor noun) has led to mixed results. Whereas speakers of (mostly) Germanic languages show a Gender-Congruency effect (GC; faster responses to same-gender pictur...
In this study we examine the extent to which aspects such as the emotionality coded in words may interfere with the processing of gender agreement errors in a sentence grammaticality judgement task. We follow the methodological pattern of our previous experiments, using consistently the same kind of structure and task (gender agreement) and only em...
There is extensive evidence showing that bilinguals activate the lexical and the syntactic representations of both languages in a nonselective way. However, the extent to which the lexical and the syntactic levels of representations interact during second language (L2) sentence processing and how those interactions are modulated by L2 proficiency r...
Abstract: In a prior phase to this study, 1250 idiomatic expressions of Spanish were collected and afterwards rated by approximately 2000 native participants. Two affective variables (valence and arousal) and five psycholinguistic variables (familiarity, knowledge of expression, semantic transparency, literal plausibility and predictability) were s...
In this review paper, we analyse how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing behavioural studies with mainly late second language (L2) learners on the so-called gender congruency (GC) effect (a facilitated processing for translation equivalents with the same gender in c...
Studies on gender processing with Germanic/Slavic languages using a Picture-Word Interference Paradigm (PWIP), in which participants are asked to name pictures by producing a Definite Determiner [DD] + a noun while ignoring a superimposed distractor word, found faster responses for pictures gender-congruent with distractors than for incongruent one...
Abstract: Unlike English and other languages, we do not have normative data on psycholinguistic and affective characteristics of idiomatic expressions in Spanish. Given the importance of this type of studies for research in figurative language processing, in this work we present a database of Spanish idiomatic expressions. The study, still in progr...
We present here emoFinder (http://usc.es/pcc/emofinder), a Web-based search engine for Spanish word properties taken from different normative databases. The tool incorporates several subjective word properties for 16,375 distinct words. Although it focuses particularly on normative ratings for emotional dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal) and di...
The present article reports an ERP study with two experiments designed to assess the influence of emotional adjectives on sentence processing by means of a gender agreement (grammaticality) judgment task. Participants were shown transitive sentences in Spanish presented word-by-word, with a complex object-NP consisting of a noun + an adjective + so...
This study reviewed research on the processing of homonymous and polysemous words in bilingual individuals and assessed its contribution to knowledge of ambiguous word processing, representation, and learning in such individuals. Available evidence supports the mutual influence of each language at the lexical and the semantic level. Specifically, r...
En este trabajo se revisan los estudios que han investigado el procesamiento, la representación y el aprendizaje de palabras ambiguas (homónimas y polisémicas) en individuos bilingües. La evidencia disponible apoya la influencia mutua entre las dos lenguas del bilingüe, tanto en un nivel léxico como semántico. Más concretamente, destaca el impacto...
Previous research has shown the impact of the emotional dimension of nouns (i.e., valence and arousal) on the completion of relative clauses (RC) that are preceded by a double antecedent (e.g.: Someone shot the servant (the first noun-phrase, NP1) of the actress (the second noun-phrase, NP2) who was on the balcony) (Fraga, Piñeiro, Acuña-Fariña, Re...
Many studies hypothesize that words evoking negative emotions such as disgust capture attention and leave persistent traces in memory. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the effect of neutral and disgust-related words as rare and unexpected distractors in a cross-modal oddball task and then probing the participants’ memory for these stimuli in...
An intriguing finding in a number of word recognition experiments is that the effects of stimulus quality and word-frequency are additive (i.e., main effects of stimulus quality [degraded words slower than visually clear words] and word-frequency [infrequent words slower than common words], but no interaction). This pattern has usually been explain...
EmoFinder is a web-based search engine for Spanish word properties/dimensions from different normative databases. It makes available a large number of these properties for more than 30,000 words, mainly focusing on normative ratings for emotional dimensions (e.g., valence, arousal) and discrete emotional categories (fear, disgust, anger, happiness,...
The present paper describes the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW)
database, which comprises 210 words (133 polysemous and 77 homographs).
Three-hundred and fifteen Spanish university students took part in the
study on which SAW is based. First, subjective word meanings and senses
were collected by means of a meaning retrieval task. Two judges then
assi...
Ambiguous words are usually classified as homonymous and polysemous words. In English there is ample evidence showing that, whereas homonymy seems to hinder word recognition, polysemy tends to facilitate it. In fact, Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson (2002) proposed that the critical distinction for the ambiguity advantage found with isolated words m...
Abstract: Since Cuetos & Mitchell's (1988) seminal paper, there have been many studies examining the attachment preferences of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs) in Spanish. The great majority of on-line studies had subjects read sentences with RCs that ambiguously modified the first or the second noun of the object noun phrase (NP). Only a few off-l...
The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approa...
Many studies investigating emotional word processing have relied on the two-dimensional model which focuses on the dimensions of valence and arousal. An alternative account, the so-called discrete emotion theories, assumes that all emotions can be derived from a limited number of universal affective states such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and...
When processing Spanish ambiguous relative clauses (RC) modifying a complex NP (CNP; e.g., someone shot the servant [NP1] of the actress [NP2] who… [RC]), Spanish speakers have a preference for attaching the RC to NP1. Recently, Grillo & Costa (2014) identified a confounding factor in the literature on RC attachment. They hypothesized that once thi...
Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the sti...
Studies of semantic variables (e.g., concreteness) and affective variables (i.e., valence and arousal) have traditionally tended to run in different directions. However, in recent years there has been growing interest in studying the relationship, as well as the potential overlaps, between the two. This article describes a database that provides su...
Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement violations using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Other studies have explored ERP patterns evoked by emotional words in isolation. This study investigates the time course of the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context u...
A processing advantage for emotional words relative to neutral words has been widely demonstrated in the monolingual domain (e.g., Kuperman et al., 2014). It is also well-known that, in bilingual speakers who have a certain degree of proficiency in their second language, the effects of the affective content of words on cognition are not restricted...
In the present study, we present normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words among 7- to 8-, 9- to 10-, and 11- to 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: (a) the percentage of associates, (b) the strength of...
Emotional words are better remembered than neutral words in the first language. Ferré, García, Fraga, Sánchez-Casas and Molero (2010) found this emotional effect also for second language words by using an encoding task focused on emotionality. The aim of the present study was to test whether the same effect can also be observed with encoding tasks...
En este trabajo se evaluó el papel de la animacidad en la desambiguación de cláusulas de relativo con doble antecedente en portugués europeo (PE). El estudio de cómo resuelve el procesador este tipo de ambigüedades ha sido objeto de gran interés en la investigación; sin embargo, en PE ésta ha sido escasa y poco consistente. Además, dado que la lite...
a b s t r a c t Emoticons seem to enrich computer-mediated communication by improving enjoyment, perceived rich-ness and usefulness of information (Huang, Yen, & Zhang, 2008). Despite their extensive use over the last decades, the way emoticons affect subsequent emotional/cognitive processing is not fully understood. Here we conducted a masked prim...
Abstract: Previous research has shown the impact of lexical properties of nouns, like animacy or the emotional dimension of words (i.e., valence and arousal), on processing relative clauses (RC) preceded by a double antecedent (e.g.: Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony). For instance, in completion studies it has been fou...
This study examined the role of phonological and orthographic overlap in the recognition of cognate words by recording electrophysiological and behavioral data. One hundred and ninety-two words were selected: 96 cognate words listed according to their phonological and orthographic overlap vs. 96 noncognate words. Twenty-four proficient European Por...
Abstract: Memory for emotional words is often better than memory for neutral words (the emotional enhancement of memory). Some studies have tested whether this enhancement is exclusively due to the affective content of words or whether it can be explained by other factors such as semantic relatedness. The results of these studies are inconclusive,...
Abstract: In the domain of relative clauses (RCs) with a double antecedent (e.g., someone shot the servant [NP1] of the actress [NP2] who… [RC]) previous completion studies in Spanish have shown that people prefer to attach the RC to a preceding animate (Piñeiro et al., 2007) or emotionally arousing (Fraga et al., in press) noun, independently of t...
We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-estab...
Se llevaron a cabo tres experimentos para evaluar la atención a palabras de diferente valor emocional. Se trabajó con un paradigma experimental de doble tarea, registrando los tiempos de respuesta ante tonos, los cuales fueron presentados durante la lectura de palabras. El recuerdo también fue evaluado a través de una prueba de memoria intencional...
This work presents an analysis of the role of animacy in attachment preferences of relative clauses to complex noun phrases in European Portuguese (EP). The study of how the human parser solves this kind of syntactic ambiguities has been focus of extensive research. However, what is known about EP is both limited and puzzling. Additionally, as rece...
Emotionally charged words are usually better remembered than neutral words. In the current study we focused on memory for emotional words in bilinguals and examined the influence of some variables that might modulate the effect of emotionality of second-language words on recall. We tested memory for positive, negative and neutral words of two group...
The pattern of masked repetition priming effects for word and nonword targets differs across tasks: Masked-priming effects in lexical decision occur for positive responses (i.e., words), but not for negative responses (nonwords), whereas masked-priming effects in the cross-case same-different task occur for positive responses (same), but not for ne...
The present paper focuses on the role of animacy in the processing of relative clauses (RCs) after complex NPs. We follow research by the Desmet et al. team on Dutch in exploring the role of animacy in Spanish RCs. We present data from a corpus study and two self-paced experiments and we compare the three studies and the Dutch and Spanish results....
