Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal a... more Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages typically verbalise only two of the sixteen connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts —"and" and "or"— the remainder appear to be entertainable as non-verbal, conceptual representations and this suggests a way to probe how linguistic and non-linguistic thinking processes relate. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking both comprehension-related and reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word for logic’s NAND operator, indicating that unlexicalised logical connectives are nonetheless conceptually available.
In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts... more 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 properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion (“pure” emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion (“mixed” emotion wo...
This study examines the distinction between knowing the meaning of a word and experiencing the fe... more 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 words) and the other half did not name emotions but could provoke them (emotion-laden words). Some participants were asked to focus on the meaning of words while others were asked to focus on the feeling produced by the words. Native speakers of English produced more intense affective ratings that Portuguese–English bilinguals. Such difference was larger when participants focused on their feelings than when they focused on the words’ meaning. Accordingly, such distinction should be considered in the study of bilingual affective language processing. Finally, the type of emotional word (emotion vs. emotion-laden) had only modest effects.
Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal a... more Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinators and and or—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—a language of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical ...
In this study, we present word prevalence data (i.e., the number of people who know a given word)... more In this study, we present word prevalence data (i.e., the number of people who know a given word) for 40,777 Catalan words. An online massive visual lexical decision task involving more than 200,000 native speakers of this language was carried out. The characteristics of the participants as well as those of the words which mostly influence word knowledge were examined. Regarding the participants, the analysis of the data revealed that their age was the main factor influencing vocabulary size, followed by their educational level and other variables such as the number of languages spoken and their level of proficiency in Catalan. Concerning the words, by far the most determining factor was lexical frequency, with a minor influence of both length and the size of the orthographic neighborhood. These data mainly agree with those reported in other languages in which the same variables have been analyzed (Dutch, English, and Spanish, thus far). Therefore, the list is increased with Catalan...
Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in... more Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction and and (inclusive) disjunction or. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and ...
These are the supplementary materials for "Prevalence norms for 40,777 Catalan words: An onl... more These are the supplementary materials for "Prevalence norms for 40,777 Catalan words: An online megastudy of vocabulary size".
This is the 400 concepts database devised for the manuscript "Emotion and concreteness effec... more This is the 400 concepts database devised for the manuscript "Emotion and concreteness effects when learning novel concepts in the native language".
Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-326.R1-Supplementary_Material_2 for Affective and concreteness ... more Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-326.R1-Supplementary_Material_2 for Affective and concreteness norms for 3,022 Croatian words by Bojana Ćoso, Marc Guasch, Pilar Ferré and José Antonio Hinojosa in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Las principales propuestas teoricas sobre el lexico bilingue asumen dos niveles de representacion... more Las principales propuestas teoricas sobre el lexico bilingue asumen dos niveles de representacion: el nivel de la representacion de la forma (ortografica y fonologica) y el nivel de representacion conceptual (semantico). El grado en que estos dos niveles de representacion son compartidos por las dos lenguas ha sido objeto de interes creciente en los ultimos anos. Distintos estudios utilizando diferentes tareas y paradigmas experimentales han mostrado que el estatus de traduccion cognaticia desempena un papel relevante a la hora de determinar como se relacionan las palabras de las dos lenguas en estos dos niveles de representacion. Las traducciones cognaticias son pares de palabras que se parecen tanto en la forma como el significado (por ejemplo, arbre-arbol) y contrastan con los falsos amigos (solo relacionados en la forma; por ejemplo, fleca-fleco) y las traducciones no-cognaticias (solo comparten su significado; por ejemplo, sorra-arena). En este articulo se revisan una serie de ...
Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit en... more Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit enough participants to achieve sufficient validity. However, the advent of the internet now allows this problem to be solved through the creation of megastudies. Yet, this methodology so far has only been used in studies on vocabulary size, while general knowledge, another key component of crystallized intelligence, remains unexamined. In the present study, regression models were used to examine the impact of sociodemographic variables—gender, age, years of study and socioeconomic status—on general knowledge scores. The sample comprised 48,234 participants, each of whom answered 60 general knowledge questions, their data being fully available online. Men were found to score higher than women in general knowledge. Years of study and socioeconomic status acted as strong and weak positive predictors, respectively. Age acted as a strong positive predictor until the age of 50, where it became p...
General knowledge questionnaires have been ubiquitously used to study a wide variety of phenomena... more General knowledge questionnaires have been ubiquitously used to study a wide variety of phenomena, such as illusory truth, error correction and tip-ofthe-tongue situations. However, their normings are highly restricted to the territory and the time period they in which they were obtained. This requires that new normings are obtained for each new territory in which they be used. Here, we present a new set of 1364 general knowledge questions normed for a Spanish population. The questions span a total of 37 different fields of knowledge and an extensive range of difficulty levels. They are formulated in a multiple-choice format, and pick rates for the correct answer as well as for the three incorrect response options are provided. We hope that a database of such size and flexibility will prove to be a useful research tool for the Spanish community.
The aim of the present study was to test the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011), according to which... more The aim of the present study was to test the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011), according to which abstract words are more affectively loaded than concrete words. To this end, we focused on the acquisition of novel concepts by means of an intentional learning experiment in which participants had to learn a set of 40 novel concepts in Spanish (definitions) associated with novel word forms (pseudowords). Concreteness (concrete vs. abstract concepts) and emotionality (neutral vs. negative concepts) were orthogonally manipulated. Acquisition was assessed through a recognition task in which participants were asked to match the novel word forms with their definitions. Results showed that concrete concepts were acquired better than abstract concepts. Importantly, the concreteness advantage disappeared when the content of the concept was negative. Hence, emotional (negative) content facilitated the acquisition of abstract concepts, but not of concrete concepts, giving support to the proposal...
Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal a... more Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages typically verbalise only two of the sixteen connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts —"and" and "or"— the remainder appear to be entertainable as non-verbal, conceptual representations and this suggests a way to probe how linguistic and non-linguistic thinking processes relate. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking both comprehension-related and reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word for logic’s NAND operator, indicating that unlexicalised logical connectives are nonetheless conceptually available.
In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts... more 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 properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion (“pure” emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion (“mixed” emotion wo...
This study examines the distinction between knowing the meaning of a word and experiencing the fe... more 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 words) and the other half did not name emotions but could provoke them (emotion-laden words). Some participants were asked to focus on the meaning of words while others were asked to focus on the feeling produced by the words. Native speakers of English produced more intense affective ratings that Portuguese–English bilinguals. Such difference was larger when participants focused on their feelings than when they focused on the words’ meaning. Accordingly, such distinction should be considered in the study of bilingual affective language processing. Finally, the type of emotional word (emotion vs. emotion-laden) had only modest effects.
Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal a... more Combining two thoughts into a compound mental representation is a central feature of our verbal and non-verbal logical abilities. We here approach this issue by focusing on the contingency that while natural languages have typically lexicalised only two of the possible 16 binary connectives from formal logic to express compound thoughts—namely, the coordinators and and or—some of the remainder appear to be entertainable in a non-verbal, conceptual representational system—a language of thought—and this suggests a theoretical split between the “lexicalisation” of the connectives and the “learnability” of invented words corresponding to unlexicalised connectives. In a visual world experiment aimed at tracking comprehension-related as well as reasoning-related aspects of the capacity to represent compound thoughts, we found that participants are capable of learning and interpreting a made-up word standing for logic's NAND operator, a result that indicates that unlexicalised logical ...
In this study, we present word prevalence data (i.e., the number of people who know a given word)... more In this study, we present word prevalence data (i.e., the number of people who know a given word) for 40,777 Catalan words. An online massive visual lexical decision task involving more than 200,000 native speakers of this language was carried out. The characteristics of the participants as well as those of the words which mostly influence word knowledge were examined. Regarding the participants, the analysis of the data revealed that their age was the main factor influencing vocabulary size, followed by their educational level and other variables such as the number of languages spoken and their level of proficiency in Catalan. Concerning the words, by far the most determining factor was lexical frequency, with a minor influence of both length and the size of the orthographic neighborhood. These data mainly agree with those reported in other languages in which the same variables have been analyzed (Dutch, English, and Spanish, thus far). Therefore, the list is increased with Catalan...
Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in... more Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction and and (inclusive) disjunction or. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and ...
These are the supplementary materials for "Prevalence norms for 40,777 Catalan words: An onl... more These are the supplementary materials for "Prevalence norms for 40,777 Catalan words: An online megastudy of vocabulary size".
This is the 400 concepts database devised for the manuscript "Emotion and concreteness effec... more This is the 400 concepts database devised for the manuscript "Emotion and concreteness effects when learning novel concepts in the native language".
Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-326.R1-Supplementary_Material_2 for Affective and concreteness ... more Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-326.R1-Supplementary_Material_2 for Affective and concreteness norms for 3,022 Croatian words by Bojana Ćoso, Marc Guasch, Pilar Ferré and José Antonio Hinojosa in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Las principales propuestas teoricas sobre el lexico bilingue asumen dos niveles de representacion... more Las principales propuestas teoricas sobre el lexico bilingue asumen dos niveles de representacion: el nivel de la representacion de la forma (ortografica y fonologica) y el nivel de representacion conceptual (semantico). El grado en que estos dos niveles de representacion son compartidos por las dos lenguas ha sido objeto de interes creciente en los ultimos anos. Distintos estudios utilizando diferentes tareas y paradigmas experimentales han mostrado que el estatus de traduccion cognaticia desempena un papel relevante a la hora de determinar como se relacionan las palabras de las dos lenguas en estos dos niveles de representacion. Las traducciones cognaticias son pares de palabras que se parecen tanto en la forma como el significado (por ejemplo, arbre-arbol) y contrastan con los falsos amigos (solo relacionados en la forma; por ejemplo, fleca-fleco) y las traducciones no-cognaticias (solo comparten su significado; por ejemplo, sorra-arena). En este articulo se revisan una serie de ...
Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit en... more Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit enough participants to achieve sufficient validity. However, the advent of the internet now allows this problem to be solved through the creation of megastudies. Yet, this methodology so far has only been used in studies on vocabulary size, while general knowledge, another key component of crystallized intelligence, remains unexamined. In the present study, regression models were used to examine the impact of sociodemographic variables—gender, age, years of study and socioeconomic status—on general knowledge scores. The sample comprised 48,234 participants, each of whom answered 60 general knowledge questions, their data being fully available online. Men were found to score higher than women in general knowledge. Years of study and socioeconomic status acted as strong and weak positive predictors, respectively. Age acted as a strong positive predictor until the age of 50, where it became p...
General knowledge questionnaires have been ubiquitously used to study a wide variety of phenomena... more General knowledge questionnaires have been ubiquitously used to study a wide variety of phenomena, such as illusory truth, error correction and tip-ofthe-tongue situations. However, their normings are highly restricted to the territory and the time period they in which they were obtained. This requires that new normings are obtained for each new territory in which they be used. Here, we present a new set of 1364 general knowledge questions normed for a Spanish population. The questions span a total of 37 different fields of knowledge and an extensive range of difficulty levels. They are formulated in a multiple-choice format, and pick rates for the correct answer as well as for the three incorrect response options are provided. We hope that a database of such size and flexibility will prove to be a useful research tool for the Spanish community.
The aim of the present study was to test the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011), according to which... more The aim of the present study was to test the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011), according to which abstract words are more affectively loaded than concrete words. To this end, we focused on the acquisition of novel concepts by means of an intentional learning experiment in which participants had to learn a set of 40 novel concepts in Spanish (definitions) associated with novel word forms (pseudowords). Concreteness (concrete vs. abstract concepts) and emotionality (neutral vs. negative concepts) were orthogonally manipulated. Acquisition was assessed through a recognition task in which participants were asked to match the novel word forms with their definitions. Results showed that concrete concepts were acquired better than abstract concepts. Importantly, the concreteness advantage disappeared when the content of the concept was negative. Hence, emotional (negative) content facilitated the acquisition of abstract concepts, but not of concrete concepts, giving support to the proposal...
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