Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

Do French speakers have an advantage in learning English vocabulary thanks to familiar suffixes?

Previous research has shown that languages from nearby families are easier to learn as second languages (L2) than languages from more distant families, attributing this difference to the presence of shared elements between the native language (L1) and L2. Building on this idea, we hypothesised that suffixes present in L1 might facilitate complex word acquisition in L2. To test this hypothesis, we recruited 76 late French-English bilinguals and tasked them with learning a set of 80 English-derived words containing suffixes that also exist in French (e.g., -able) or are unique to English (e.g., -ness). Consolidation of the learned words was assessed 1 week after the last learning session. The results showed a significant learning effect across the learning trials and consolidation, suggesting that the bilingual participants were able to acquire the derived words. However, contrary to our hypothesis, suffixes also existing in French did not give a significant advantage over English-unique suffixes. Further analysis revealed that this was due to variations in the consistency of familiar suffixes from L1. While some translation pairs shared the same suffix (e.g., amazement-étonnement), others had different suffixes (e.g., slippage-glissement). The type of translation pair with inconsistent suffix overlap (slippage-glissement) carried learning costs, preventing the bilingual participants from benefitting from the presence of familiar suffixes in L2 words. These findings suggest that shared information can be used effectively for L2 learning only if the mapping between L1 and L2 is consistent.

Designing and evaluating tasks to measure individual differences in experimental psychology: a tutorial.

Experimental psychology is witnessing an increase in research on individual differences, which requires the development of new tasks that can reliably assess variations among participants. To do this, cognitive researchers need statistical methods that many researchers have not learned during their training. The lack of expertise can pose challenges not only in designing good, new tasks but also in evaluating tasks developed by others. To bridge the gap, this article provides an overview of test psychology applied to performance tasks, covering fundamental concepts such as standardization, reliability, norming and validity. It provides practical guidelines for developing and evaluating experimental tasks, as well as for combining tasks to better understand individual differences. To further address common misconceptions, the article lists 11 prevailing myths. The purpose of this guide is to provide experimental psychologists with the knowledge and tools needed to conduct rigorous and insightful studies of individual differences.

The Children and Young People's Books Lexicon (CYP-LEX): A large-scale lexical database of books read by children and young people in the United Kingdom.

This article introduces the Children and Young People's Books-Lexicon (CYP-LEX), a large-scale lexical database derived from books popular with children and young people in the United Kingdom. CYP-LEX includes 1,200 books evenly distributed across three age bands (7-9, 10-12, 13+) and comprises over 70 million tokens and over 105,000 types. For each word in each age band, we provide its raw and Zipf-transformed frequencies, all parts-of-speech in which it occurs with raw frequency and lemma for each occurrence, and measures of count-based contextual diversity. Together and individually, the three CYP-LEX age bands contain substantially more words than any other publicly available database of books for primary and secondary school children. Most of these words are very low in frequency, and a substantial proportion of the words in each age band do not occur on British television. Although the three age bands share some very frequent words, they differ substantially regarding words that occur less frequently, and this pattern also holds at the level of individual books. Initial analyses of CYP-LEX illustrate why independent reading constitutes a challenge for children and young people, and they also underscore the importance of reading widely for the development of reading expertise. Overall, CYP-LEX provides unprecedented information into the nature of vocabulary in books that British children aged 7+ read, and is a highly valuable resource for those studying reading and language development.

Seeing emotions in the eyes: a validated test to study individual differences in the perception of basic emotions.

People are able to perceive emotions in the eyes of others and can therefore see emotions when individuals wear face masks. Research has been hampered by the lack of a good test to measure basic emotions in the eyes. In two studies respectively with 358 and 200 participants, we developed a test to see anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise in images of eyes. Each emotion is measured with 8 stimuli (4 male actors and 4 female actors), matched in terms of difficulty and item discrimination. Participants reliably differed in their performance on the Seeing Emotions in the Eyes test (SEE-48). The test correlated well not only with Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) but also with the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU), indicating that the SEE-48 not only measures low-level perceptual skills but also broader skills of emotion perception and emotional intelligence. The test is freely available for research and clinical purposes.

Ratings of valence, arousal, happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise for 24,000 Dutch words.

Emotion is a fundamental aspect of human life and therefore is critically encoded in language. To facilitate research into the encoding of emotion in language and how emotion associations affect language processing, we present a new set of emotion norms for over 24,000 Dutch words. The emotion norms include ratings of two key dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal, as well as ratings on discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. We show that emotional information can predict word processing, such that responses to positive words are facilitated in contrast to neutral and negative words. We also demonstrate how the ratings of emotion are related to personality characteristics. The data are available via the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/9htuv/ ) and serve as a valuable resource for research into emotion as well as in applied settings such as healthcare and digital communication.

No Correlation Between Articulation Speed and Silent Reading Rate when Adults Read Short Texts.

Silent reading often involves phonological encoding of the text in addition to orthographic processing. The nature of the phonological code is debated, however: Is it an abstract code or does it contain information about the pronunciation of the visual stimulus? To answer this question, we investigated the relationship between articulation speed and reading speed, both for silent reading and reading aloud. We investigated whether people with fast articulation speed read faster than people with slow articulation speed. We recruited 94 participants, who in a Zoom session were asked to read short texts silently or aloud. They were also asked to talk about their lives and say the numbers 1-10 or the months of the year as quickly as possible. Finally, they completed an online vocabulary test and an author recognition test. Multiple regression analysis and cluster analysis showed that although the speed of reading aloud and silent reading correlated to some extent, they belonged to two different clusters. Reading aloud was mainly related to talking fluency and articulation speed, while silent reading was more related to vocabulary and knowledge about fiction authors. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the phonological code in silent reading typically does not contain articulatory information, although our data do not rule out the possibility that this may be the case for a small percentage of people or when people read more difficult texts.

Validated tests for language research with university students whose native language is English: Tests of vocabulary, general knowledge, author recognition, and reading comprehension.

We present five studies aimed at developing an L1 vocabulary test for English-speaking university students. Such a test is useful as an indicator of crystallized intelligence and because vocabulary size correlates well with reading comprehension. In the first study, we tested 100 written words with four answer alternatives, based on Nation's Vocabulary Size Test. Analysis suggested two factors, which we interpreted as the possible existence of two types of difficult words: unknown words for general knowledge and unknown words for specialized knowledge. In Study 2, we attempted to develop a vocabulary test for each type of word, and these tests were then validated in Study 3. Since the test for general words proved too easy for the target population, we improved it in a fourth study by creating and testing more difficult items. Finally, a fifth study was conducted to validate the new test. Unexpectedly, Study 5 found a high correlation (r = .82) between the general knowledge vocabulary test and the specialized knowledge vocabulary test, suggesting that they measure the same latent factor, contrary to our initial assumption. Both tests have high reliability (r > .85) and correlate well (r > .4) with general knowledge, author recognition, and reading comprehension. In addition, a collection of other language tests was used and improved to verify the validity of the vocabulary tests. An exploratory factor analysis of all tests identified three factors (text comprehension, crystallized intelligence, and reading speed), with the vocabulary tests loading on the factor crystallized intelligence, which in turn correlates with reading comprehension. Structural equation modeling confirmed the interpretation.

Concreteness ratings for 62,000 English multiword expressions.

Concreteness describes the degree to which a word's meaning is understood through perception and action. Many studies use the Brysbaert et al. (2014) concreteness ratings to investigate language processing and text analysis. However, these ratings are limited to English single words and a few two-word expressions. Increasingly, attention is focused on the importance of multiword expressions, given their centrality in everyday language use and language acquisition. We present concreteness ratings for 62,889 multiword expressions and examine their relationship to the existing concreteness ratings for single words and two-word expressions. These new ratings represent the first big dataset of multiword expressions, and will be useful for researchers interested in language acquisition and language processing, as well as natural language processing and text analysis.

Semantic gender: Norms for 24,000 Dutch words and its role in word meaning.

Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6017 words each on a five-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by ten male and ten female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system.

The Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences: 75th Anniversary.

The Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS) is a learned society founded in 1947. Its mission is to unite people in Belgium interested in the development and application of psychological sciences. It does so through the publication of Psychologica Belgica, the organisation of an annual scientific meeting, the award of prizes, initiatives to improve the communication among members, and representing researchers and psychologists nationally and internationally. The present paper describes the third 25-year period of BAPS. It reviews the main initiatives and activities of the society from 1997 to 2022.

Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO).

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans.

The Representations of Chinese Characters: Evidence from Sublexical Components.

Little research has been done about the neural substrate of the sublexical level of Chinese word recognition. In particular, it is unclear how radicals participate in Chinese word processing. We compared two measures of radical combinability, position-general radical combinability (GRC) and position-specific radical combinability (SRC) depending on whether the position of the radical is taken into account. We selected characters with embedded target radicals that had different GRC and SRC measures. These measures were used as predictors in a parametric modulation analysis and a multivariate representational similarity analysis. Human participants with native Mandarin speakers (17 males and 24 females) were asked to read words in search of animal words. Results showed that SRC is a better predictor than GRC in decoding the neural patterns. Whole-brain analysis indicated that SRC is encoded bilaterally in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, pars opercularis, and pars triangularis), the middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and a region on the border of the superior parietal lobule and the inferior parietal lobule (SPL/IPL). Region-of-interest-based RSA confirmed the results of the whole-brain analysis. Furthermore, we observed a correlation of another sublexical variable, logographeme composition, with bilateral activity in SPL. Logographemes refer to the basic stroke combinations that form radicals and characters. Finally, we observed involvement of bilateral cerebellum activity in Chinese word recognition. Our findings confirm the importance of sublexical components (SRC and logographeme composition) in Chinese word recognition and also confirm that Chinese word recognition involves more bilateral processing than word recognition in alphabetical languages.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Chinese is a logographic language. However, characters contain informative subword components (radicals, logographemes, and strokes). We investigated whether the position of the radical is important. We presented carefully selected words and looked where brain activity correlated with subword information. Results indicate that position-dependent radicals predict brain encoding in a network of regions associated with Chinese word recognition, including higher order regions such as bilateral IFG, MFG, and SPL/IPL. Logographeme composition had an effect as well. Our findings provide strong evidence (1) for the importance of position-specific radical information and logographemes in Chinese word recognition, (2) that current brain imaging techniques are best suited to study these, and (3) that confirms the interactive nature of Chinese character recognition.

A lingering question addressed: Reading rate and most efficient listening rate are highly similar.

Is it possible that silent reading rate is the same as the most efficient listening rate? The hypothesis has been formulated in the past, but never got much traction because silent reading is almost twice as fast as typical speech. On the other hand, several studies have shown that listening comprehension retains high quality for spoken materials presented at speeds up to 275 words per minute (wpm), and a recent meta-analysis has also shown that reading rate is lower than often thought: 240-260 wpm on average. To address the question above, we ran a new study specifically comparing spontaneous silent reading rate with comprehension of speech presented at different rates within the same participants and using matched texts. We replicated the finding that listening comprehension was not hindered at the speech rate of 270 wpm but showed a steep decline at the rate of 315 wpm. Thus, the most efficient observed listening rate was on par with the spontaneous reading rate for the same texts (269 wpm on average). Therefore, we conclude that listening and reading follow the same time constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Affect across adulthood: Evidence from English, Dutch, and Spanish.

Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use, and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity, and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. However, language experience changes over an individual's lifetime, making the examination of the emotion-laden lexicon an important topic not only across the life span but also across languages. Furthermore, existing theories predict a range of different age-related trajectories in processing valenced words. The present study pits all of these predictions against written productions (Facebook status updates from over 20,000 users) and behavioral data from three publicly available megastudies on different languages, namely English, Dutch, and Spanish, across adulthood. The production data demonstrated an increase in positive word types and tokens with advancing age. In terms of comprehension, the results showed a uniform and consistent effect of valence across languages and cohorts based on data from a visual word recognition task. The difference in reaction times to very positive and very negative words declined with age, with responses to positive words slowing down more strongly with age than responses to negative words. We argue that the results stem from lifelong learning and emotion regulation: Advancing age is accompanied by an increased type frequency of positive words in language production, which is mirrored as a discrimination penalty in comprehension. To our knowledge, this is the first study to simultaneously target both language production and comprehension across adulthood and in a cross-linguistic perspective. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving reading rate prediction with word length information: Evidence from Dutch.

Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In this study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in non-fiction) instead of 4.6. We collected reading rates of 62 participants reading 12 texts with varying word lengths and examined which change in the English equation accounts for the Dutch findings. We observed that predictions were close to the best-fitting curve as soon as the average English word length was replaced by the average Dutch word length. The equation predicts that Dutch texts with an average word length of 5.1 letters will be read at a rate of 238 words per minute (wpm). Texts with an average word length of 4.5 letters will be read at 270 wpm, and texts with an average word length of 6.0 letters will be read at a rate of 202 wpm. The findings are in line with the assumption that the longer words in Dutch do not slow down silent reading relative to English and that the word length effect observed in each language is due to word processing effort and not to low-level visual factors.

The Dutch Auditory & Image Vocabulary Test (DAIVT): A New Dutch Receptive Vocabulary Test for Students.

We introduce a new Dutch receptive vocabulary test, the Dutch auditory & image vocabulary test (DAIVT). The test is multiple choice and assesses vocabulary knowledge for spoken words. The measure has an online (available at https://tpsurvey.ugent.be/limesurvey315/index.php/923234?lang=nl) format, has free access, and allows easy data collection. The test was developed with the intent to enable testing for research purposes with university students. This paper describes the test construction. We cover three phases: 1) collecting stimulus materials and developing the test's first version, 2) an exploratory item-analysis on the first draft (n = 93), and 3) validating the test (both the second and the final version) by comparing it to two existing tests (n = 270, n = 157). The results indicate that the test is reliable and correlates well with existing Dutch receptive vocabulary tests (convergent validity). The final version of the DAIVT comprises 90 test items and 1 practice item. It can be used freely for research purposes.

Towards a unified understanding of lateralized vision: A large-scale study investigating principles governing patterns of lateralization using a heterogeneous sample.

While functional lateralization of the human brain has been a widely studied topic in the past decades, few studies to date have gone further than investigating lateralization of single, isolated processes. With the present study, we aimed to arrive at a more unified view by investigating lateralization patterns in face and word processing, and associated lower-level visual processing. We tested a large and heterogeneous participant group, and used a number of tasks that had been shown to produce replicable indices of lateralized processing of visual information of different types and complexity. Following Bayesian statistics, group-level analyses showed the expected right hemisphere (RH) lateralization for face, global form, low spatial frequency processing, and spatial attention, and left hemisphere (LH) lateralization for visual word and local feature processing. Compared to right-handed individuals, lateralization patterns of left-handed and especially those who are RH-dominant for language deviated from this 'typical' pattern. Our results support the notion that face and word processes come to be lateralized to homologue areas of the two hemispheres, under influence of the RH- and LH-specializations in global form, local feature, and low and high spatial frequency processing. As such, we present a more unified understanding of lateralized vision, providing evidence for the input asymmetry and causal complementarity principles of lateralized visual information processing. The absence of correlations between spatial attention and lateralization of the other processes supports the notion of their independent lateralization, conform the statistical complementarity principle.