Roberto Ramírez Heredia

• Experimental Psychology, Ph.D.
• Professor at Texas A&M International University

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions This study revisits the finding that code-switched language comprehension takes longer than non-switched language. Design/methodology/approach Using an auditory moving window task, bilinguals operating in single (English) or dual (Spanish–English) language communities listened to sentences presented a...

Two experiments examined meaning (re)activation of English idiomatic expressions by Spanish-dominant, English-dominant and balanced bilinguals. Participants listened to idiomatic expressions of the type I always 3*miss the boat1* when it comes to jokes, and that2* makes it nearly4* impossible to attend comedy shows, and made lexical decisions to vi...

We first provide a critical review of the existing findings on bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve from moderator-mediator warranting cause-effect research conclusions. We next address the question of direct or indirect effects between bilingualism and neurocognitive protective factors influencing the associated age-related mental de...

p>In three experiments, using the auditory moving window task, bilinguals operating in single (English) or dual (Spanish and English) language communities listened to successive sound segments of sentences presented one at a time. In Experiments 1a-b, sentences were in Spanish and the critical target was either a code-switch ( | ’ pik(ə)ls| ) or a...

p>In three experiments, using the auditory moving window task, bilinguals operating in single (English) or dual (Spanish and English) language communities listened to successive sound segments of sentences presented one at a time. In Experiments 1a-b, sentences were in Spanish and the critical target was either a code-switch ( | ’ pik(ə)ls| ) or a...

In this paper we investigate the effect that parents’ language use (English, Spanish-English or Spanish) had on self-perceived proficiency, frequency of use, language anxiety, code-switching and cultural orientation of 206 Spanish-English bilinguals and multilinguals who were students in Texas where there is a strong presence of Spanish, the minori...

Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - edited by Roberto R. Heredia January 2020

This chapter reports on three experiments using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to explore whether interlingual homographs (i.e., words with competing semantic and overlapping orthographic representations) are activated selectively or nonselectively. The literature is somewhat controversial when it comes to the question of how bilinguals p...

Cambridge Core - Cognition - Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - edited by Roberto R. Heredia

This chapter explores various aspects and assumptions of models of bilingual language processing and organization. A brief overview of theoretical language models is provided to include a discussion of the distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism, as well as models of connectionism, hierarchical structures, and a recently proposed m...

Idioms and metaphors, in particular, have long been of interest to researchers working within the realm of online language processing. This chapter largely focus on these two kinds of expressions. It outlines the major findings in monolingual research on non‐literal language processing that employed event‐related potentials (ERPs). The chapter revi...

This entry provides a theoretical and empirical overview of the classic theoretical approaches to encoding (e.g., levels of processing, the generation, distributed‐practice, and repetition effects) in bilingual episodic memory. It is concluded that bilingual retrieval is enhanced by such factors as deep processing, elaboration, distinctiveness, and...

Idioms are notoriously challenging for second/foreign (L2) language learners whose competence in the use of figurative expressions often lags behind their overall L2 communicative competence. This entry identifies the major challenges that L2 idiomatic expressions pose for L2 learners. Such challenges are related to the differences between the proc...

This entry provides a theoretical and empirical overview of some of the issues related to the compound‐coordinate bilingual distinction, and suggests some possibilities on how best to study it. It is argued that if, during the bilingual learning process, language‐dependent memories are acquired or stored in episodic memory, the episodic memory trac...

This chapter reviews some of the major theoretical approaches to encoding (e.g., levels of processing, the generation, distributed-practice, and repetition effects) and retrieval (e.g., encoding specificity principle and transfer appropriate processing) in bilingual episodic memory. An overview of the published findings suggests that, like the clas...

The purpose of the experiments reported here is to explore the effects of task (implicit vs. explicit) on the activation of literal and figurative meanings of English idiomatic expressions in the course of their processing by Spanish–English bilinguals varying along their dominance in English or Spanish. Two experiments were carried out using a rap...

Previous research has indicated that women prefer men who exhibit an android physical appearance where fat distribution is deposited on the upper body (i.e., shoulders and arms) and abdomen. This ideal physical shape has been associated with perceived dominance, health, and immunocompetence. Although research has investigated attractability of men...

The aim of this volume is to integrate the current literature about the psychological dimensions of bilingualism: that is, to analyze psychological, subjective, and internal perspectives on bilingualism. What is the internal world of bilinguals like? How do they perceive the world and how do they think? What are the advantages and disadvantages of...

Previous research has indicated that women prefer men that exhibit an android physical appearance where fat distribution is deposited on the upper body (i.e., shoulders and arms) and abdomen. This ideal physical shape has been associated with perceived dominance, health, and immunocompetence. Although research has investigated attractability of men...

This study examines the processing of metaphoric reference by bilingual speakers. English dominant, Spanish dominant, and balanced bilinguals read passages in English biasing either a figurative (e.g., describing a weak and soft fighter that always lost and everyone hated) or a literal (e.g., describing a donut and bakery shop that made delicious p...

Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and breast size are morphological traits that are associated with female attractiveness. Previous studies using line drawings of women have shown that men across cultures rate low WHRs (0.6 and 0.7) as most attractive. In this study, we used additional viewing measurements (i.e., first fixation duration and visual regressio...

This chapter critically reviews the self-paced visual moving window (VMW) technique and its variants as used in the bilingual reading literature. In the first section, we provide a general overview of some of the variables known to compromise the validity of an experimental task, or an experiment in general. In the second section, we review bilingu...

This chapter discusses cross-language activation in the course of processing language by bilingual speakers. We first discuss the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm (CMLP), a powerful tool to explore online multiple language activation. We next provide an overview of research concerning multiple language activation in the course of bilingual lexi...

The current chapter introduces the reader to the vision and the contents of the present volume—Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research. The focus is on traditional as well as newly developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading. Findings are critically reviewed stemming from the well-known behavioral approaches to...

The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSV...

This chapter explores the various methodological tasks employed in the study of bilingual figurative language processing. In the first part of the chapter, we discuss classic behavioral reading paradigms such as rapid serial visual presentation, visual and auditory moving windows, and the newly developed reading integration maze task, as well as ey...

In two experiments, we examine the processing of metaphoric reference, where a metaphoric description (e.g., creampuff) makes reference to an antecedent describing a cowardly boxer during the online comprehension of spoken sentences. We measured activation levels of figurative (e.g., boxer) and literal (e.g., pastry) interpretations of the metaphor...

Bilingual Figurative Language Processing is a timely book that provides a much-needed bilingual perspective to the broad field of figurative language. This is the first book of its kind to address how bilinguals acquire, store, and process figurative language, such as idiomatic expressions (e.g., kick the bucket), metaphors (e.g., lawyers are shark...

This paper reports an eye movement study and the effects of salience, context, and language dominance on the processing of idiomatic expressions by Spanish–English bilinguals. Salient meanings of figurative expressions are those which are processed first and accessed automatically from the mental lexicon, regardless of contextual bias (Giora 2003)....

A recurring theoretical issue in the study of bilingualism concerns the manner in which speakers of one or more languages might store their languages in memory. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014. All rights are reserved.

Cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists alike will likely attest to the fact that the bulk of research over many decades in these fields has been devoted to the understanding of human memory. We know that we are who we are, because of our memories, and thus, it is one of the most important functions of the mind that one can ponder, researc...

Foundations of Bilingual Memory provides a valuable update to the field of bilingual memory and offers a new psychological perspective on how the bilingual mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information. This volume emphasizes theoretical issues, such as classic memory approaches, Compound-Coordinate Bilingualism, Bilingual Dual Coding Theory, and...

Paivio’s (1971, 2007, Csapo 1969, 1973) Dual Coding Theory (DCT) is revisited in two experiments. Past research (e.g. Paivio 1991a; Tse, Altarriba 2009) shows superiority in recalling pictures over words and concrete vs. abstract words. The presence of both codes produces an additive effect on memory, such that, for example, a word and its associat...

This study investigates the contribution of the left and right hemispheres to the comprehension of bilingual figurative language and the joint effects of salience and context on the differential cerebral involvement in idiom processing. The divided visual field and the lexical decision priming paradigms were employed to examine the activation of sa...

This study examined the extent to which Chinese-English bilinguals' representations of common categories are similar or different in each of their languages. More specifically, it examined variations in a particular aspect of graded structure: the extent to which exemplars are differentially accessible from corresponding category labels in two lang...

This chapter provides a general overview of some of the major theories psycholinguistics have employed to explain how bilinguals store and access information from and between their two languages. It starts with reviews on early theoretical formulations, and goes on to evaluate Paivio's bilingual dual coding theory, and the highly influential hierar...

Chinese-English bilingual participants listed exemplars of 10 common categories on two occasions, one week apart. Half responded in the same language in both sessions (Chinese or English) and half responded in one language in one session and the other language in the other session. There was substantial overlap in the exemplars listed across the se...

Two lexical decision semantic priming experiments examined when, in the course of reading a joke, the initial and the intended meanings are primed; whether the meanings overlap in time; and what happens to the initial reading when the punchline is encountered. In Experiment 1, probes related to the first activated sense (S1) vs. the second sense (S...

The purpose of this special issue of Experimental Psychology is to present to the bilingual research community a database of high quality peer-reviewed articles, introducing new and powerful empirical psycholinguistic techniques to study how bilinguals process linguistic information at the sentence level, from both the visual and spoken modalities...

This study investigates how English monolinguals and bilinguals access lexical forms such as call on, which can be interpreted as either a phrasal verb, as in John called on the student, or as a verb-preposition combination, as in John called on the third floor. The results of an on-line sentence comprehension experiment indicate that both monoling...

In this chapter, we review several methodological approaches to studying spoken language comprehension in bilinguals. In particular, we focus on those tasks that allow for closer scrutiny of sentence level processing, including gating (Grosjean, 1980, Grosjean, 1996), cued shadowing (Bates & Liu, 1996), cross-modal lexical priming (Swinney, 1979),...

Four experiments investigated stereotype processing during the on-line comprehension of spoken sentences. Participants listened to a critical prime (terrorist) embedded in a sentence and then made lexical decisions to visually presented standard-related (bomb) or stereotype-related targets (Arab) or unrelated controls for both conditions. For Exper...

Speakers and writers often use metaphor to describe someone or something in a referential fashion (e.g., The creampuff didn't show up for the fight to refer to a cowardly boxer). Research has demonstrated that readers do not comprehend metaphoric reference as easily as they do literal reference (Gibbs, 1990; Onishi & Murphy, 1993). In two experimen...

Bilingual speakers often code-switch from one language to another, especially when both languages are used in the environment. This article explores the potential theoretical explanations for this language behavior, the costs and benefits associated with language switching, and the role of language dominance in the direction of the switch. In short...