A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages.

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 hence distinguish between transparent nouns, i.e., those displaying form regularities; opaque nouns, i.e., those with ambiguous endings; and irregular nouns, i.e., those that display the typical form regularities but are associated with the opposite gender. Following a descriptive analysis of such regularities, languages have been recently classified according to their degree of gender transparency, which seems relevant in regard to gender acquisition and processing. Yet, there are certain inconsistencies in determining which languages are overall transparent and which are opaque. In particular, it is not clear whether some other complex regularities such as derivational suffixes are also "transparent" cues for gender, what really constitutes an "opaque" noun, or which role orthography and morphology have in transparency. Given the existing inconsistencies in classifying languages as transparent or opaque, this work introduces a proposal to assess gender transparency systematically. Our methodology adapts the standardized factors proposed by Audring (2019) to analyse the relative complexity of gender systems. Such factors are adapted to gender transparency on the basis of the literature on gender acquisition and processing. To support the feasibility of such a proposal, the concepts have been instantiated in a quantitative model to obtain for the first time an objective measure of gender transparency using European Portuguese and Dutch as instances of target languages. Our results coincide with the theoretically expected outcome: European Portuguese obtains a high value of gender transparency while Dutch obtains a moderately low one. Future adaptations of this model to the gender systems of other languages could allow the continuum of gender transparency to sustain robust predictions in studies on gender processing and acquisition.

On Empirical Methodology, Constraints, and Hierarchy in Artificial Grammar Learning.

This paper considers the AGL literature from a psycholinguistic perspective. It first presents a taxonomy of the experimental familiarization test procedures used, which is followed by a consideration of shortcomings and potential improvements of the empirical methodology. It then turns to reconsidering the issue of grammar learning from the point of view of acquiring constraints, instead of the traditional AGL approach in terms of acquiring sets of rewrite rules. This is, in particular, a natural way of handling long-distance dependences. The final section addresses an underdeveloped issue in the AGL literature, namely how to detect latent hierarchical structure in AGL response patterns.

Language and Thought in the Motion Domain: Methodological Considerations and New Empirical Evidence.

This study investigates whether there is a relation between how motion is linguistically expressed and how it is conceptualised. To do this, native speakers of two languages that differ typologically in how they encode telic motion (English and Spanish) are compared in both a verbal and a non-verbal experiment. The preferred non-verbal methods to test the linguistic relativity hypothesis in this domain have so far been recognition memory and binary judgments. This study questions the experimental validity of these approaches and implements an alternative method which combines similarity ratings with a verbal interference manipulation. The results reported here constitute evidence against linguistic relativity and in support of cognitive universalism.

Italian norms and naming latencies for 357 high quality color images.

In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring effective experimental designs is using ecological stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most relevant variables affecting the processing of their items. In the context of image sets, color photographs are particularly suited to this purpose as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings. This is especially so in clinical populations. In this study we provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging to 23 semantic subcategories from the Moreno-Martínez and Montoro database. Data from several variables affecting image processing were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-speaking participants: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Lexical frequency data were derived from the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data on image oral naming latencies to explore how the variance in these latencies could be explained by these critical variables. Multiple regression analyses on the naming latencies show classical psycholinguistic phenomena, such as the effects of age of acquisition and name agreement. In addition, manipulability was also a significant predictor. The described Italian normative data and naming latencies are available for download as supplementary material.

StimulStat: A lexical database for Russian.

In this article, we present StimulStat - a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, including frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic and phonological neighborhood frequency and size, grammatical ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from various dictionaries and are presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others were computed specifically for the database. The database can be accessed freely at http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru .

Thai Norms for Name, Image, and Category Agreement, Object Familiarity, Visual Complexity, Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects.

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773 ). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.

Reliability in content analysis: The case of semantic feature norms classification.

Semantic feature norms (e.g., STIMULUS: car → RESPONSE: ) are commonly used in cognitive psychology to look into salient aspects of given concepts. Semantic features are typically collected in experimental settings and then manually annotated by the researchers into feature types (e.g., perceptual features, taxonomic features, etc.) by means of content analyses-that is, by using taxonomies of feature types and having independent coders perform the annotation task. However, the ways in which such content analyses are typically performed and reported are not consistent across the literature. This constitutes a serious methodological problem that might undermine the theoretical claims based on such annotations. In this study, we first offer a review of some of the released datasets of annotated semantic feature norms and the related taxonomies used for content analysis. We then provide theoretical and methodological insights in relation to the content analysis methodology. Finally, we apply content analysis to a new dataset of semantic features and show how the method should be applied in order to deliver reliable annotations and replicable coding schemes. We tackle the following issues: (1) taxonomy structure, (2) the description of categories, (3) coder training, and (4) sustainability of the coding scheme-that is, comparison of the annotations provided by trained versus novice coders. The outcomes of the project are threefold: We provide methodological guidelines for semantic feature classification; we provide a revised and adapted taxonomy that can (arguably) be applied to both concrete and abstract concepts; and we provide a dataset of annotated semantic feature norms.

HelexKids: A word frequency database for Greek and Cypriot primary school children.

In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency. These values are derived from 116 textbooks used in primary education in Greece and Cyprus, producing a total of 68,692 different word types. HelexKids was developed to assist researchers in studying language development, educators in selecting age-appropriate items for teaching, as well as writers and authors of educational books for Greek/Cypriot children. The database is open access and can be searched online at www.helexkids.org .

Rated age-of-acquisition norms for over 3,200 German words.

Words that have been learned early in life are responded to faster than words that have been acquired later. Subjective ratings of acquisition ages have been successfully employed to study the effect of age of acquisition (AoA). Although a large number of norms exist in many languages, fewer are available for German. Therefore, subjective AoA ratings for 3,259 German words were collected online, including 2,363 nouns and 473 verbs. These words were presented in lists of 140 words, and participants rated the age in years at which they had first learned each word. A split-half correlation testified to a high internal reliability. There were also high correlations with rated AoA values for subsets of the items that had been collected in previous studies, in both German and English. Age and gender were found to influence the ratings very weakly, in that older and male participants tended to give slightly higher age ratings. Education, multilingualism, and frequent usage of languages other than German did not exert an influence on the rating values. These new ratings will extend the currently existing norms available for language and reading research across languages and will provide researchers with a wider choice of word stimuli. The ratings are available expressed in two measurements: age in years, and AoA rated on a 7-point Likert scale.

The Calgary semantic decision project: concrete/abstract decision data for 10,000 English words.

Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman's (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words.

Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic.

Normative databases for pictorial stimuli are widely used in research on language processing in order to control for a number of psycholinguistic variables in the selected stimuli. Such resources are lacking for Arabic and its dialectal varieties. In the present study, we aimed to provide Tunisian Arabic (TA) normative data for 348 line drawings taken from Cycowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (1997), which include Snodgrass and Vanderwart's (1980) 260 pictures. Norms were collected for the following psycholinguistic variables: name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability. Word length data (in numbers of phonemes and syllables) are also listed in the database. We investigated the effects of these variables on word reading in TA. We found that word length and frequency were the best predictors of word-reading latencies in TA. Name agreement was also a significant predictor of word-reading latencies. A particularly interesting finding was that the semantic variables, imageability and familiarity, affected word-reading latencies in TA. Thus, it would seem that TA readers rely on semantics even when reading individual Arabic words that are transparent in terms of orthography-to-phonology mappings. This database represents a precious and much-needed psycholinguistic resource for researchers investigating language processing in Arabic-speaking populations.

Spanish norms for affective and lexico-semantic variables for 1,400 words.

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 subjective ratings for 1,400 Spanish words for valence, arousal, concreteness, imageability, context availability, and familiarity. Data were collected online through a process involving 826 university students. The results showed a high interrater reliability for all of the variables examined, as well as high correlations between our affective and semantic values and norms currently available in other Spanish databases. Regarding the affective variables, the typical quadratic correlation between valence and arousal ratings was obtained. Likewise, significant correlations were found between the lexico-semantic variables. Importantly, we obtained moderate negative correlations between emotionality and both concreteness and imageability. This is in line with the claim that abstract words have more affective associations than concrete ones (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, 2011). The present Spanish database is suitable for experimental research into the effects of both affective properties and lexico-semantic variables on word processing and memory.

Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL): the cultural adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R) for Polish.

In the present article, we introduce the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL), created in order to provide researchers with a database of 2,902 Polish words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and imageability. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic features of the words (frequency, grammatical class, and number of letters) are also controlled. The database is a Polish adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R; Võ et al., Behavior Research Methods 41:534-538, 2009), commonly used to investigate the affective properties of German words. Affective normative ratings were collected from 266 Polish participants (136 women and 130 men). The emotional ratings and psycholinguistic indexes provided by NAWL can be used by researchers to better control the verbal materials they apply and to adjust them to specific experimental questions or issues of interest. The NAWL is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use as supplementary material to this article.

Recognizing emotional speech in Persian: a validated database of Persian emotional speech (Persian ESD).

Research on emotional speech often requires valid stimuli for assessing perceived emotion through prosody and lexical content. To date, no comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian is officially available. The present article reports the process of designing, compiling, and evaluating a comprehensive emotional speech database for colloquial Persian. The database contains a set of 90 validated novel Persian sentences classified in five basic emotional categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), as well as a neutral category. These sentences were validated in two experiments by a group of 1,126 native Persian speakers. The sentences were articulated by two native Persian speakers (one male, one female) in three conditions: (1) congruent (emotional lexical content articulated in a congruent emotional voice), (2) incongruent (neutral sentences articulated in an emotional voice), and (3) baseline (all emotional and neutral sentences articulated in neutral voice). The speech materials comprise about 470 sentences. The validity of the database was evaluated by a group of 34 native speakers in a perception test. Utterances recognized better than five times chance performance (71.4 %) were regarded as valid portrayals of the target emotions. Acoustic analysis of the valid emotional utterances revealed differences in pitch, intensity, and duration, attributes that may help listeners to correctly classify the intended emotion. The database is designed to be used as a reliable material source (for both text and speech) in future cross-cultural or cross-linguistic studies of emotional speech, and it is available for academic research purposes free of charge. To access the database, please contact the first author.

Capturing additional information about the organization of entries in the lexicon from verbal fluency productions.

Troyer and colleagues [Troyer, A. K., Moscovitch, M., & Winocur, G. (1997). Clustering and switching as two components of verbal fluency: evidence from younger and older healthy adults. Neuropsychology, 11(1), 138-146] developed a seminal method to measure clustering and switching behaviors during verbal fluency (VF) productions. We sought to expand the reach of their system by modifying the scoring rules. Compared to the Troyer system, our modifications yield comparable estimates of interrater reliability and similar patterns of correlation with demographic characteristics for both clustering and switching in healthy adults. However, two objective measures of word relatedness (interword interval timing and latent semantic analysis) confirm that our revisions capture additional information about the organization of entries in the lexical network.

Speechreading development in deaf and hearing children: introducing the test of child speechreading.

PURPOSE: In this article, the authors describe the development of a new instrument, the Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS), which was specifically designed for use with deaf and hearing children. Speechreading is a skill that is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a deaf-friendly, computer-based test that measures child speechreading (silent lipreading) at 3 psycholinguistic levels: (a) Words, (b) Sentences, and (c) Short Stories. The aims of the study were to standardize the ToCS with deaf and hearing children and to investigate the effects of hearing status, age, and linguistic complexity on speechreading ability. METHOD: Eighty-six severely and profoundly deaf children and 91 hearing children participated. All children were between the ages of 5 and 14 years. The deaf children were from a range of language and communication backgrounds, and their preferred mode of communication varied. RESULTS: Speechreading skills significantly improved with age for both groups of children. There was no effect of hearing status on speechreading ability, and children from both groups showed similar performance across all subtests of the ToCS. CONCLUSION: The ToCS is a valid and reliable assessment of speechreading ability in school-age children that can be used to measure individual differences in performance in speechreading ability.

Item-level psychometrics and predictors of performance for Spanish/English bilingual speakers on an object and action naming battery.

PURPOSE: There is a pressing need for psychometrically sound naming materials for Spanish/English bilingual adults. To address this need, in this study the authors examined the psychometric properties of An Object and Action Naming Battery (An O&A Battery; Druks & Masterson, 2000) in bilingual speakers. METHOD: Ninety-one Spanish/English bilinguals named O&A Battery items in English and Spanish. Responses underwent a Rasch analysis. Using correlation and regression analyses, the authors evaluated the effect of psycholinguistic (e.g., imageability) and participant (e.g., proficiency ratings) variables on accuracy. RESULTS: Rasch analysis determined unidimensionality across English and Spanish nouns and verbs and robust item-level psychometric properties, evidence for content validity. Few items did not fit the model, there were no ceiling or floor effects after uninformative and misfit items were removed, and items reflected a range of difficulty. Reliability coefficients were high, and the number of statistically different ability levels provided indices of sensitivity. Regression analyses revealed significant correlations between psycholinguistic variables and accuracy, providing preliminary construct validity. The participant variables that contributed most to accuracy were proficiency ratings and time of language use. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest adequate content and construct validity of O&A items retained in the analysis for Spanish/English bilingual adults and support future efforts to evaluate naming in older bilinguals and persons with bilingual aphasia.

Implicit causality bias in English: a corpus of 300 verbs.

This study provides implicit verb causality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs. A web-based sentence completion study was conducted, with 96 respondents completing fragments such as "John liked Mary because..." The resulting bias scores are provided as supplementary material in the Psychonomic Society Archive, where we also present lexical and semantic verb features, such as the frequency, semantic class and emotional valence. Our results replicate those of previous studies with much smaller numbers of verbs and respondents. Novel effects of gender and its interaction with verb valence illustrate the type of issues that can be investigated using stable norms for a large number of verbs. The corpus will facilitate future studies in a range of areas, including psycholinguistics and social psychology.