Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables.

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and affective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers' profile (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 proficiency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors-linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers-affect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46 .

On the flexibility of the sound-to-meaning mapping when listening to native and foreign-accented speech.

Extracting linguistic information from the speech signal is critical to successfully communicate with others. We usually carry out this sound-to-meaning mapping easily, but this process may be hampered under adverse listening conditions. Thus, exploring whether foreign accents might affect the sound-to-meaning mapping is particularly relevant, as interactions with these speakers are increasingly common in the globalized world. In this study, we conducted a cross-modal priming task, in which participants (N = 24) were presented with auditory primes uttered by a native or by a French foreign-accented speaker of Spanish, and with visual targets that had different degrees of relatedness to the prime: repeated, semantically related, or unrelated words. Behavioral and EEG measures were analyzed, and we found a significant relatedness effect (i.e., a processing advantage for repeated compared to related words, and for the latter compared to unrelated words). However, speakers' accents had no effect on the results. To further explore the potential effect of speakers' accent on the sound-to-meaning mapping, we conducted a second study, in which participants (N = 22) were presented with the same task, although in this case primes were uttered by the same native speaker as in the previous experiment, and by a German foreign-accented speaker with a stronger accent. We replicated the results observed in the first study. Taken together, our results show moderate evidence that speakers' accent does not affect the sound-to-meaning mapping, suggesting that this is a robust and flexible process that is not compromised by auditory variables related to speakers' characteristics.

Would You Sacrifice Yourself to Save Five Lives? Processing a Foreign Language Increases the Odds of Self-Sacrifice in Moral Dilemmas.

Foreign languages blunt emotional reactions to moral dilemmas. In this study, we aimed at clarifying whether this reduced emotional response applies to the emotions related to the self, empathy, or both. Participants were presented with moral dilemmas, written in their native or foreign language, in which they could sacrifice one man or themselves in order to save five lives (or do nothing and therefore leave five people to die). They were more willing to sacrifice themselves when processing the dilemmas in their foreign language. Also, empathy scores were reduced when responding in the foreign language, but were no reliable predictors of participants' responses to the dilemmas. These results suggest that processing a foreign language reduces emotional reactivity due to psychological and emotional self-distance.

A systematic review of disease related stigmatization in patients living with prostate cancer.

BACKGROUND: Prostate cancer has been shown to be susceptible to significant stigmatisation, because to a large extent it is concealable, it has potentially embarrassing sexual symptoms and has significant impact on the psychosocial functioning. METHODS: This review included studies that focused on qualitative and/or quantitative data, where the study outcome was prostate cancer and included a measure of stigmatization. Electronic databases (CINAHL, Medline, PubMed, PsycInfo, Cochrane Library, PROSPERO, and the Joanna Briggs Institute) and one database for grey literature Opengrey.eu, were screened. We used thematic analysis, with narrative synthesis to analyse these data. We assessed risk of bias in the included studies using the RoBANS. RESULTS: In total, 18 studies met review inclusion criteria, incorporating a total of 2295 participants. All studies recruited participants with prostate cancer, however four studies recruited participants with other cancers such as breast cancer and lung cancer. Of the 18 studies, 11 studies evaluated perceived or felt stigma; four studies evaluated internalised or self-stigma; three studies evaluated more than one stigma domain. DISCUSSION: We found that patients living with prostate cancer encounter stigmatisation that relate to perception, internalisation, and discrimination experiences. We also identified several significant gaps related to the understanding of prostate cancer stigmatization, which provides an opportunity for future research to address these important public health issues. REGISTRATION: This systematic review protocol is registered with PROSPERO, the international prospective register of systematic reviews in health and social care. Registration number: CRD42020177312.

The Psychological Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Decision-Making Processes.

A sample of 641 participants were presented with four decision-making tasks during the first stages of the COVID-19 lockdown in Spain: The dictator game, framing problems, utilitarian/deontological and altruistic/egoistic moral dilemmas. Participants also completed questionnaires on mental health status and experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We used boosted regression trees (an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning) to model relationships between responses to the questionnaires and decision-making tasks. Results showed that the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic predicted participants' responses to the framing problems and utilitarian/deontological and altruistic/egoistic moral dilemmas (but not to the dictator game). More concretely, the more psychological impact participants suffered, the more they were willing to choose the safest response in the framing problems, and the more deontological/altruistic were their responses to moral dilemmas. These results suggest that the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic might prompt automatic processes.

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others.

Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers' sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers' rates of sharing; and (2) how children's emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler's merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers' levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children's performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.

Seeing music: The perception of melodic 'ups and downs' modulates the spatial processing of visual stimuli.

Musical melodies have "peaks" and "valleys". Although the vertical component of pitch and music is well-known, the mechanisms underlying its mental representation still remain elusive. We show evidence regarding the importance of previous experience with melodies for crossmodal interactions to emerge. The impact of these crossmodal interactions on other perceptual and attentional processes was also studied. Melodies including two tones with different frequency (e.g., E4 and D3) were repeatedly presented during the study. These melodies could either generate strong predictions (e.g., E4-D3-E4-D3-E4-[D3]) or not (e.g., E4-D3-E4-E4-D3-[?]). After the presentation of each melody, the participants had to judge the colour of a visual stimulus that appeared in a position that was, according to the traditional vertical connotations of pitch, either congruent (e.g., high-low-high-low-[up]), incongruent (high-low-high-low-[down]) or unpredicted with respect to the melody. Behavioural and electroencephalographic responses to the visual stimuli were obtained. Congruent visual stimuli elicited faster responses at the end of the experiment than at the beginning. Additionally, incongruent visual stimuli that broke the spatial prediction generated by the melody elicited larger P3b amplitudes (reflecting 'surprise' responses). Our results suggest that the passive (but repeated) exposure to melodies elicits spatial predictions that modulate the processing of other sensory events.

Foreign-accented speech modulates linguistic anticipatory processes.

Listeners are able to anticipate upcoming words during sentence comprehension, and, as a result, they also pre-activate semantically related words. In the present study, we aim at exploring whether these anticipatory processes are modulated by indexical properties of the speakers, such as a speaker's accent. Event-related brain potentials were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native (Experiment 1) or foreign-accented speakers (Experiment 2) of Spanish producing highly constrained sentences. The sentences ended in: (1) the highest cloze probability completion, (2) a word semantically related to the expected ending, or (3) a word with no semantic overlap with the expected ending. In Experiment 1, we observed smaller N400 mean amplitudes for the semantically related words as compared to the words with no semantic overlap, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, we observed no difference in integrating semantically related and unrelated words when listening to accented speech. These results suggest that linguistic anticipatory processes are affected by indexical properties of the speakers, such as the speaker's accent.

Discourse comprehension in L2: Making sense of what is not explicitly said.

Using ERPs, we tested whether L2 speakers can integrate multiple sources of information (e.g., semantic, pragmatic information) during discourse comprehension. We presented native speakers and L2 speakers with three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, or causally unrelated to its context; its interpretation therefore required simple or complex inferences. Native speakers revealed a gradual N400-like effect, larger in the causally unrelated condition than in the highly related condition, and falling in-between in the intermediately related condition, replicating previous results. In the crucial intermediately related condition, L2 speakers behaved like native speakers, however, showing extra processing in a later time-window. Overall, the results show that, when reading, L2 speakers are able to process information from the local context and prior information (e.g., world knowledge) to build global coherence, suggesting that they process different sources of information to make inferences online during discourse comprehension, like native speakers.

Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech.

This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker.