Estudio normativo de la familiaridad subjetiva en niños de segundo grado de Educación Primaria en Medellín (Colombia) / A Normative Study of Subjective Familiarity in Children of the Second Grade of School in Medellin (Colombia)

Resumen El objetivo de este estudio, consistió en evaluar la familiaridad subjetiva (FS) de 827 palabras en 187 niños de segundo grado de educación primaria de la ciudad de Medellín. Las palabras, fueron extraídas de diferentes textos escolares y se ajustaron a tres parámetros psicolingüísticos: consistencia ortográfica, estructura silábica y longitud. En la prueba realizada, los niños debían indicar si conocían nada, poco, mucho o muchísimo cada una de las palabras seleccionadas. De acuerdo con esto, se asignó un valor numérico a cada palabra. Un análisis estadístico de las medianas de las palabras, permitió seleccionar 405 palabras con FS alta y 422 palabras con FS baja. Los resultados, muestran que los parámetros psicolingüísticos propuestos se relacionan con la FS.

Abstract The aim of this study was to assess the subjective familiarity of 827 words in 187 second-grade children from the city of Medellín. The words were taken from textbooks and adjusted to three psycholinguistic parameters: orthographic consistency, syllabic structure and length. In these tests, the children had to indicate whether they knew each of the words and according to their responses, a numerical value was assigned. A statistical analysis of the medians allowed the selection of 405 words of high subjective familiarity y 422 words of low subjective familiarity. The results show that the proposed psycholinguistic parameters relate to subjective familiarity.

Detecting time-specific differences between temporal nonlinear curves: Analyzing data from the visual world paradigm.

In multiple fields of study, time series measured at high frequencies are used to estimate population curves that describe the temporal evolution of some characteristic of interest. These curves are typically nonlinear, and the deviations of each series from the corresponding curve are highly autocorrelated. In this scenario, we propose a procedure to compare the response curves for different groups at specific points in time. The method involves fitting the curves, performing potentially hundreds of serially correlated tests, and appropriately adjusting the overall alpha level of the tests. Our motivating application comes from psycholinguistics and the visual world paradigm. We describe how the proposed technique can be adapted to compare fixation curves within subjects as well as between groups. Our results lead to conclusions beyond the scope of previous analyses.

Clustering words to match conditions: an algorithm for stimuli selection in factorial designs / Agrupar palabras para igualar condiciones: un algoritmo para la selección de palabras en diseños factoriales

With the increasing refinement of language processing models and the new discoveries about which variables can modulate these processes, stimuli selection for experiments with a factorial design is becoming a tough task. Selecting sets of words that differ in one variable, while matching these same words into dozens of other confounding variables is time consuming and error prone. To assist experimenters in this thankless task, we present a simple method to perform it with little effort. The method is based on Kmeans clustering as a way to detect small and tight clusters of words that match in the desired variables. We have formalized the procedure into an algorithmic format, that is, a series of easy-to-follow steps. In addition, we also provide an SPSS syntax that helps in choosing the correct size of the clustering. After reviewing the theory, we present a worked example that will guide the reader through the complete procedure. The dataset of the worked example is available as a supplementary material to this paper (AU)

Con el creciente refinamiento de los modelos de procesamiento del lenguaje y los nuevos hallazgos sobre qué variables pueden modular dichos procesos, la selección de palabras para experimentos de diseño factorial se está convirtiendo en una tarea cada vez más ardua. Seleccionar conjuntos de palabras que difieren en una variable pero que están igualadas en una decena de posibles variables extrañas, lleva mucho tiempo y está sujeto a errores. Para ayudar a los experimentadores en esta desagradecida tarea, presentamos un método sencillo que permite realizarla con poco esfuerzo. El método se basa en el agrupamiento de Kmedias para identificar conjuntos pequeños y compactos de palabras igualadas en las variables deseadas. El procedimiento ha sido formalizado en un algoritmo, esto es, una serie de pasos concretos y sencillos de seguir. Además, también aportamos la sintaxis en SPSS para ayudar en la selección del número adecuado de agrupaciones. Tras una revisión de la teoría, presentamos un ejemplo práctico que guiará al lector a través del procedimiento completo. El conjunto de datos del ejemplo se encuentra disponible como material complementario a este artículo (AU)

Worldlex: Twitter and blog word frequencies for 66 languages.

Lexical frequency is one of the strongest predictors of word processing time. The frequencies are often calculated from book-based corpora, or more recently from subtitle-based corpora. We present new frequencies based on Twitter, blog posts, or newspapers for 66 languages. We show that these frequencies predict lexical decision reaction times similar to the already existing frequencies, or even better than them. These new frequencies are freely available and may be downloaded from http://worldlex.lexique.org .

Megastudies, crowdsourcing, and large datasets in psycholinguistics: An overview of recent developments.

This paper introduces and summarizes the special issue on megastudies, crowdsourcing, and large datasets in psycholinguistics. We provide a brief historical overview and show how the papers in this issue have extended the field by compiling new databases and making important theoretical contributions. In addition, we discuss several studies that use text corpora to build distributional semantic models to tackle various interesting problems in psycholinguistics. Finally, as is the case across the papers, we highlight some methodological issues that are brought forth via the analyses of such datasets.

Predicting raters' transparency judgments of English and Chinese morphological constituents using latent semantic analysis.

The morphological constituents of English compounds (e.g., "butter" and "fly" for "butterfly") and two-character Chinese compounds may differ in meaning from the whole word. Subjective differences and ambiguity of transparency make judgments difficult, and a computational alternative based on a general model might be a way to average across subjective differences. In the present study, we propose two approaches based on latent semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais in Psychological Review 104:211-240, 1997): Model 1 compares the semantic similarity between a compound word and each of its constituents, and Model 2 derives the dominant meaning of a constituent from a clustering analysis of morphological family members (e.g., "butterfingers" or "buttermilk" for "butter"). The proposed models successfully predicted participants' transparency ratings, and we recommend that experimenters use Model 1 for English compounds and Model 2 for Chinese compounds, on the basis of differences in raters' morphological processing in the different writing systems. The dominance of lexical meaning, semantic transparency, and the average similarity between all pairs within a morphological family are provided, and practical applications for future studies are discussed.

La morfosintaxis de los enunciados: ¿categorías lingüísticas de la profundidad a la superficie o regulaciones en línea sobre base pragmático-semántica? / The morphosyntax of utterances: linguistic categories from depth to surface or pragmatic and semantic rules?

Una idea muy extendida en la psicología del lenguaje considera que las categorías formales y funcionales utilizadas en lingüística estructural para describir los hechos de lengua tienen realidad psicológica para la organización de los enunciados. A continuación demostramos que esta creencia no es sostenible. Una orientación teórica alternativa prevé una traducción directa de las relaciones de significado, proporcionadas por una matriz semántica que interviene dentro de un marco pragmático, en secuencias léxicas de superficie; y los registros productivos se constituyen a través de analogías sustitutivas aprendidas de forma implícita. Esta afirmación, mucho más cerca de la opinión de los partidarios de las neurociencias cognitivas, tiene importantes implicaciones para la terapia de rehabilitación en logopedia de la morfosintaxis. © 2010 AELFA. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L. Todos los derechos reservados (AU)

A widely held idea in the psychology of language is that the formal and functional categories used in structural linguistics to describe language phenomena have a psychological reality for the organization of utterances. In the present article, we demonstrate that this belief is untenable. An alternative theoretical approach envisages direct translation of meaning relations, provided by a semantic matrix that intervenes within a pragmatic framework, in superficial lexical sequences; productive registers are created through implicitly learned substitution analogies. This affirmation, which is closer to the viewpoint of the cognitive neurosciences, has important implications for the speech therapy of morphosyntactic difficulties (AU)

Oral frequency norms for 67,979 Spanish words.

Frequency of occurrence is an important attribute of lexical units, and one that is widely used in psychological research and theorization. Although printed frequency norms have long been available for Spanish, and subtitle-based norms have more recently been published, oral frequency norms have not been systematically compiled for a representative set of words. In this study, a corpus of over three million units, representing present-day use of the language in Spain, was used to derive a frequency count of spoken words. The corpus consisted of 913 separate documents that contained transcriptions of oral recordings obtained in a wide variety of situations, mostly radio and television programs. The resulting database, containing absolute and relative frequency values for 67,979 orally produced words, is presented. Validity analyses showed significant correlations of oral frequency with other frequency measures and suggest that oral frequency can predict some types of lexical processing with the same or higher levels of precision, when contrasted with text- or subtitle-based frequencies. In conclusion, we discuss ways in which these oral frequency norms can be put to use. The norms can be downloaded from www.springerlink.com.

A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a Web application that provides instant access to thousands of potential participants for survey-based psychology experiments, such as the acceptability judgment task used extensively in syntactic theory. Because AMT is a Web-based system, syntacticians may worry that the move out of the experimenter-controlled environment of the laboratory and onto the user-controlled environment of AMT could adversely affect the quality of the judgment data collected. This article reports a quantitative comparison of two identical acceptability judgment experiments, each with 176 participants (352 total): one conducted in the laboratory, and one conducted on AMT. Crucial indicators of data quality--such as participant rejection rates, statistical power, and the shape of the distributions of the judgments for each sentence type--are compared between the two samples. The results suggest that aside from slightly higher participant rejection rates, AMT data are almost indistinguishable from laboratory data.

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.

Descriptive norms for 245 Italian idiomatic expressions.

The present study reports descriptive normative measures for 245 Italian verbal idiomatic expressions. For each of the idiomatic expressions the following variables are reported: Length, Knowledge, Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Predictability, Syntactic flexibility, Literality and Compositionality. Syntactic flexibility was assessed using five syntactic operations: adverb insertion, adjective insertion, left dislocation, passive and movement. The psycholinguistic relevance of each dimension, their measures and the correlations among them are provided and discussed. The databases are freely available for down-loading from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Datos normativos de concreción de 730 palabras utilizadas por sujetos de habla castellana / Normative values of concreteness for 730 words used by spanish speakers

El presente estudio se planteó con el objetivo de calcular el índice psicolingüístico de concreción de una serie de palabras que resultan de interés en la investigación psicológica. El corpus analizado constó de 730 palabras, la mayoría de las cuales son ejemplares frecuentes de categorías naturales de acuerdo con normas de producción categorial en castellano. El resto, que fueron añadidas con fines metodológicos, se tomaron de una de las bases de datos de índices psicolingüísticos más frecuentemente utilizadas en castellano. Esta inclusión nos permitió, además, actualizar los valores de concreción de estas palabras y poner a prueba la estabilidad de dicho índice. Los resultados apoyan la estabilidad del mismo ante cambios generacionales y cambios en el tamaño muestral. Los datos obtenidos permiten un empleo más sofisticado de los estímulos verbales a los profesionales que trabajan en el campo de la investigación, la neuropsicología clínica y la educación. Finalmente, el estudio expone las principales limitaciones asociadas a los estudios normativos de obtención de índices psicolingüísticos y propone estrategias para su afrontamiento(AU)

The present study was aimed at compiling the concreteness values for a pool of words of particular interest to psychological research. The analyzed set included 730 words, most of which were common exemplars of natural categories according to Spanish-language norms. The rest of the words, which were added for methodological reasons, were selected from one of the most frequently used databases of psycholinguistic indexes in Spanish. This inclusion gave us the opportunity to update the concreteness values of these words as well as testing the stability of this index. The results support the stability of this index despite generational changes and changes in the sample size. The data obtained in this study enable researchers, clinicians and other professionals to make a more sophisticated usage of the verbal stimuli. Finally, this paper identifies the main limitations associated to normative studies for obtaining psycholinguistic indexes and suggests strategies for addressing these limitations(AU)

Influencia de las variables psicolingüísticas sobre el efecto de generación / The influence of the psicholinguistic variables on the generation effect

El efecto de generación ha demostrado ser una técnica útil para mejorar el aprendizaje y el recuerdo de muy diversos tipos de materiales. Sin embargo no se ha encontrado este efecto en materiales sin significado, como las pseudopalabras, por lo que es lógico pensar que la familiaridad de los estímulos (su frecuencia y edad de adquisición) podría influir en la eficacia de esta técnica. Para comprobar esta hipótesis se llevaron a cabo dos experimentos en los que se manipulaban la frecuencia y la edad de adquisición. La potencia del efecto de generación impidió que se manifestaran los efectos de estas dos variables en la tarea de recuerdo libre, pero ambas influyeron en la tarea de reconocimiento. Así, se obtuvo "efecto espejo" tanto de frecuencia como de edad de adquisición, de manera que los estímulos menos familiares fueron mejor reconocidos que los más familiares (AU)

The generation effect has demonstrated to be an effective technique to improve learning and memory of several types of materials. However, this effect has not been found when meaningless materials are used, such as pseudo words. That is why it is logical to think that the familiarity of the stimuli (their frequency and age of acquisition) could influence the efficacy of this technique. To test this hypothesis two experiments, in which the frequency and the age of acquisition were manipulated, were carried out. The power of the generation effect did not allow the effects of these two variables to become evident in the recall task, but both influenced there cognition task. A "mirror effect" of frequency and age of acquisition was obtained, as the participants recognized the unfamiliar better than the familiar stimuli (AU)

LEXIN: a lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers.

The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP's (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos's (1995), and Martínez and García's (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.

Corroborating biased indicators: global and local agreement among objective and subjective estimates of printed word frequency.

The internal validity of several types of experiments in experimental psychology and neuroscience depends in part on the possibility of controlling or manipulating critical lexical variables such as word frequency of occurrence. Two ways of estimating this variable are (1) objective frequency counts and (2) subjective ratings of word frequency. Each method produces estimates that generally agree (i.e., they are highly correlated) but that disagree substantially concerning the relative frequency of a number of words. To investigate this issue more closely, the global and local agreement of subjective frequency estimates was examined in detail for a pool of 6,202 words drawn from the OMNILEX database of French words (Desrochers, 2006; www.omnilex.uottawa.ca). The results indicated that objective and subjective frequencies are strongly correlated, subjective frequencies share a significant amount of bias variance with other lexical characteristics (e.g., imageability), and the codeterminants of subjective frequency are in an antagonistic relationship with one another. The implications of these results for the selection of lexical stimuli are discussed, and multiple variables to aid in item selection are reported. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Evaluating the validity of computerized content analysis programs for identification of emotional expression in cancer narratives.

Psychological interventions provide linguistic data that are particularly useful for testing mechanisms of action and improving intervention methodologies. For this study, emotional expression in an Internet-based intervention for women with breast cancer (n = 63) was analyzed via rater coding and 2 computerized coding methods (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count [LIWC] and Psychiatric Content Analysis and Diagnosis [PCAD]). Although the computerized coding methods captured most of the emotion identified by raters (LIWC sensitivity = .88; PCAD sensitivity = .83), both over-identified emotional expression (LIWC positive predictive value = .31; PCAD positive predictive value = .19). Correlational analyses suggested better convergent and discriminant validity for LIWC. The results highlight previously unrecognized deficiencies in commonly used computerized content-analysis programs and suggest potential modifications to both programs that could improve overall accuracy of automated identification of emotional expression. Although the authors recognize these limitations, they conclude that LIWC is superior to PCAD for rapid identification of emotional expression in text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Complex questions asked by defense lawyers but not prosecutors predicts convictions in child abuse trials.

Attorneys' language has been found to influence the accuracy of a child's testimony, with defense attorneys asking more complex questions than the prosecution (Zajac & Hayne, J. Exp Psychol Appl 9:187-195, 2003; Zajac et al. Psychiatr Psychol Law, 10:199-209, 2003). These complex questions may be used as a strategy to influence the jury's perceived accuracy of child witnesses. However, we currently do not know whether the complexity of attorney's questions predict the trial outcome. The present study assesses whether the complexity of questions is related to the trial outcome in 46 child sexual abuse court transcripts using an automated linguistic analysis. Based on the complexity of defense attorney's questions, the trial verdict was accurately predicted 82.6% of the time. Contrary to our prediction, more complex questions asked by the defense were associated with convictions, not acquittals.

A comparison of two lists providing emotional norms for English words (ANEW and the DAL).

Although different in terms of purpose, word-selection procedures, and rating scales, both the ANEW (n = 1034) and DAL (n = 8742) lists, which have 633 words in common, provide normative emotional ratings for English words. This research compared the lists and cross-validated the two main lexical dimensions of affect. Parallel representatives of the two dimensions (Valence and Pleasantness, Arousal and Activation) were correlated across lists (rs = .86, .63). In tune with their separate purposes, the ANEW list, which was designed to describe emotional words, included more rare words, while the DAL, which was designed for natural language applications, included more common ones. The Valence-Activation scatterplot for ANEW was C-shaped and included fewer Arousing words of medium Valence, such as "awake," "debate," and "proves," while the DAL included fewer less common words descriptive of emotion such as "maniac," "corrupt," and "lavish." In view of these differences, list similarities strongly support the generalizability of the two main lexical dimensions of affect.

Using statistical smoothing to estimate the psycholinguistic acceptability of novel phrases.

Native speakers of languages perceive differences in the acceptability of phrases even when those phrases are both grammatical and novel (previously unseen). We suggest that smoothing, a statistical technique used by natural language processing engineers, provides several candidate mechanisms for investigating this phenomenon. We describe the creation of a large data set of predictions from several smoothing algorithms about the acceptability of unseen grammatical phrases and a novel experimental method for the pairwise comparison of these models. We use this method to compare three smoothing methods and consider the results in light of the differences among the models. We argue that the data support the idea that similarity in this domain is best thought of as a form of asymmetric representational distortion and that the informational basis over which such estimates are made is broad, rather than narrow, as has been previously suggested.