Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and visual word recognition

Is the approach avoidance compatibility effect moderated by word imageability?

The approach/avoidance (AA) compatibility effect refers to the fact that individuals respond faster by an approach movement to positive than to negative stimuli, whereas they respond faster by an avoidance movement to negative than to positive stimuli. Although this effect has been observed in many studies, the underlying mechanisms remain still unclear. On the basis of recent studies suggesting a key role of sensorimotor information in the emergence of the AA compatibility effect, the present study aimed to investigate the specific role of visual information, operationalised through word imageability, in the production of the AA compatibility effect. We orthogonally manipulated the emotional valence (positive/negative) and the imageability (low/high) of words in an incidental online-AA task (i.e., in the absence of valence processing goals) using a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 300 ms. In line with previous studies, Experiment 1 revealed an AA compatibility effect in the absence of valence processing goals. However, this effect was not moderated by word imageability. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the absence of influence of word imageability could be due to the short SOA (300 ms) used in this experiment. We used the same design as in Experiment 1 and manipulated the SOA (400 vs 600 ms). We again observed an AA compatibility effect which was not moderated by word imageability, whatever the SOA used. The results of both experiments suggest the absence of any influence of sensorimotor information in the AA compatibility effect, at least when provided by the to-be-approached/avoided stimulus.

Does context matter for memory? Testing the effectiveness of learning by imagining situated interactions with objects

Mounting evidence supports the efficacy of mental imagery for verbal information retention. Motor imagery, imagining oneself interacting physically with the object to be learned, emerges as an optimal form compared to less physically engaging imagery. Yet, when engaging in mental imagery, it occurs within a specific context that may affect imagined actions and consequently impact the mnemonic benefits of mental imagery. In a first study, participants were given instructions for incidental learning: mental rehearsal, visual imagery, motor imagery or situated motor imagery. The latter, which involved imagining physical interaction with an item within a coherent situation, produced the highest proportion of correct recalls. This highlights memory's role in supporting situated actions and offers the possibility for further developing the mnemonic potential of embodied mental imagery. Furthermore, item-level analysis showed that individuals who engaged in situated motor imagery remembered words primarily due to the sensorimotor characteristics of the words' referent. A second study investigating the role of inter-item distinctiveness in this effect failed to determine the extent to which the situational and motor elements need to be distinctive in order to be considered useful retrieval cues and produce an optimal memory performance.

Verbal deception in picture naming

Telling a lie requires several cognitive processes. We investigated three cognitive processes involved in verbal deception: the decision to deceive, the suppression of the true statement, and the construction of the false statement. In a standard picture-naming task, participants were instructed to commit true and false naming statements. Critically, participants could freely decide to name the picture (i.e., true naming events) or to commit a verbal deception and use a different name (i.e., false naming events). Different types of analysis were performed with the aim of exploring the influence of semantic, lexical, and phonological information of the target picture in the decision, suppression, and construction processes. The first type of analysis revealed that participants decided to lie more often when the target picture was less typical or less familiar. The second and third types of analysis focused on the false naming events. False naming latencies turned out to be faster when the name of the target picture was a highly frequent or an earlier-acquired name, suggesting an influence of lexical variables in the suppression of the true statement. The third analysis type explored the phonological relationship between the word that participants uttered in the false statements and the target picture name. No phonological influences emerged in this last analysis. These findings demonstrate that verbal deception is tied to semantic and lexical variables corresponding to true statements.

Statistical Analysis of Multisensory and Text-Derived Representations on Concept Learning

When learning concepts, cognitive psychology research has revealed that there are two types of concept representations in the human brain: language-derived codes and sensory-derived codes. For the objective of human-like artificial intelligence, we expect to provide multisensory and text-derived representations for concepts in AI systems. Psychologists and computer scientists have published lots of datasets for the two kinds of representations, but as far as we know, no systematic work exits to analyze them together. We do a statistical study on them in this work. We want to know if multisensory vectors and text-derived vectors reflect conceptual understanding and if they are complementary in terms of cognition. Four experiments are presented in this work, all focused on multisensory representations labeled by psychologists and text-derived representations generated by computer scientists for concept learning, and the results demonstrate that (1) for the same concept, both forms of representations can properly reflect the concept, but (2) the representational similarity analysis findings reveal that the two types of representations are significantly different, (3) as the concreteness of the concept grows larger, the multisensory representation of the concept becomes closer to human beings than the text-derived representation, and (4) we verified that combining the two improves the concept representation.

Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words

Compounds are morphologically complex words made of different linguistic parts. They are very prevalent in a number of languages such as French. Different psycholinguistic characteristics of compounds have been used in certain studies to investigate the mechanisms involved in compound processing (see Table 7). We provide psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. The words were normed on seven characteristics: lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, sensory experience, conceptual familiarity, imageability, age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency. Reliability measures were computed for the collected norms. Descriptive statistical analyses, and correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed. We also report some comparisons made between our normative data and certain norms obtained in other similar studies. The entire set of norms, which will be very useful to researchers investigating the processing of compounds, is available as Supplemental Material.

Perceptual and Interoceptive Strength Norms for 270 French Words

Perceptual experience through the five modalities (i.e., vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) has demonstrated its key role in semantics. Researchers also highlighted the role of interoceptive information in the grounded representation of concepts. However, to this day, there is no available data across these modalities in the French language. Therefore, the aim of this study was to circumvent this caveat. Participants aged between 18 and 50 completed an online survey in which we recorded scores of perceptual strength (PS), interoceptive information, imageability, concreteness, conceptual familiarity, and age of acquisition of 270 words of the French language. We also analysed the relationships between perceptual modalities and psycholinguistic variables. Results showed that vast majority of concepts were visually-dominant. Correlation analyses revealed that the five PS variables were strongly correlated with imageability, concreteness, and conceptual familiarity and highlight that PS variables index one aspect of the semantic representations of a word. On the other hand, high interoceptive scores were highlighted only for the less imageable and less concrete words, emphasizing their importance for the grounding of abstract concepts. Future research could use these norms in the investigation of the role of perceptual experience in the representation of concepts and their impact on word processing.

Semantic similarity and associated abstractness norms for 630 French word pairs

The representation of abstract concepts remains a challenge, justifying the need for further experimental investigation. To that end, we introduce a normative database for 630 semantically similar French word pairs and associated levels of abstractness for 1260 isolated words based on data from 900 subjects. The semantic similarity and abstractness norms were obtained in two studies using 7-point scales. The database is organised according to word-pair semantic similarity, abstractness, and associated lexical variables such as word length (in number of letters), word frequency, and other lexical variables to allow for matching of experimental material. The associated variables were obtained by cross-referencing our database with other known psycholinguistic databases including Lexique (New et al., 2004), the French Lexicon Project (Ferrand et al., 2010), Wordlex (Gimenes & New, 2016), and MEGALEX (Ferrand et al., 2018). We introduced sufficient diversity to allow researchers to select pairs with varying levels of semantic similarity and abstractness. In addition, it is possible to use these data as continuous or discrete variables. The full data are available in the supplementary materials as well as on OSF ( https://osf.io/qsd4v/ ).

FANCat: French affective norms for ten emotional categories

The present study develops key research for French word norms that combines the predominant theories of dimensional and discrete (or categorical) emotions. As a result, we provide the database FANCat, affective norms for a set of 1031 French words on ten discrete emotion categories: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, awe, excitement, contentment, amusement, and serenity. FANCat complements a previous word set, FAN, which provides only the dimensional norms, valence, and arousal (Monnier & Syssau, 2014). Herein, we introduce five discrete positive emotions in efforts to differentiate positive emotions at higher resolution and specificity. Although ten emotional categories were considered in FANCat norms, results showed a high degree of inter-rater reliability and a good external validity. Then, distributional analyses of words into the ten emotion categories revealed that positive words evoked mainly the emotions awe, contentment, and amusement, and principally evoked either one positive emotion only ("pure" words) or two (mixed words). This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between language, and negative and positive emotions. It is also currently the only norms database in French that analyses ten discrete emotions as well as including valence and arousal. FANCat is available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338622765_FANCat_database .

Visual and auditory perceptual strength norms for 3,596 French nouns and their relationship with other psycholinguistic variables

Perceptual experience plays a critical role in the conceptual representation of words. Higher levels of semantic variables such as imageability, concreteness, and sensory experience are generally associated with faster and more accurate word processing. Nevertheless, these variables tend to be assessed mostly on the basis of visual experience. This underestimates the potential contributions of other perceptual modalities. Accordingly, recent evidence has stressed the importance of providing modality-specific perceptual strength norms. In the present study, we developed French Canadian norms of visual and auditory perceptual strength (i.e., the modalities that have major impact on word processing) for 3,596 nouns. We then explored the relationship between these newly developed variables and other lexical, orthographic, and semantic variables. Finally, we demonstrated the contributions of visual and auditory perceptual strength ratings to visual word processing beyond those of other semantic variables related to perceptual experience (e.g., concreteness, imageability, and sensory experience ratings). The ratings developed in this study are a meaningful contribution toward the implementation of new studies that will shed further light on the interaction between linguistic, semantic, and perceptual systems.

Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Normative ratings for perceptual and motor attributes of 750 object concepts in Spanish

Subjective ratings of perceptual and motor attributes were obtained for a set of 750 concrete concepts in Spanish by requiring scale-based judgments from a sample of university students (N = 539). Following on the work of Amsel, Urbach, and Kutas (2012), the seven attributes were color, motion, sound, smell, taste, graspability, and pain. Normative data based on the obtained ratings are provided as a tool for future investigations. Additionally, the relationships of these attributes to other lexical dimensions (e.g., familiarity, frequency, concreteness) and the factorial organization of concepts around the main components were analyzed. The pattern of results is consistent with prior findings that highlight the relevance of dimensions related to survival as being crucially involved in conceptual processing.

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities. Different regression analyses were conducted to illustrate potential ways to exploit this megastudy database. First, we compared the proportions of variance accounted for by five word frequency measures. Second, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the relative importance of the lexical variables influencing performance in the different modalities (visual and auditory). Finally, we compared the similarities and differences between the two modalities. All data are freely available on our website ( https://sedufau.shinyapps.io/megalex/ ) and are searchable at www.lexique.org , inside the Open Lexique search engine.

Experience with compound words influences their processing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader's experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.

The Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS): Ratings of Dominance, Familiarity, Subjective Age of Acquisition and Sensory Experience

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.

Are animacy effects in episodic memory independent of encoding instructions?

The adaptive view of human memory [Nairne, J. S. 2010. Adaptive memory: Evolutionary constraints on remembering. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 53 pp. 1-32). Burlington: Academic Press; Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. 2010a. Adaptive memory: Ancestral priorities and the mnemonic value of survival processing. Cognitive Psychology, 61, 1-22, 2010b; Memory functions. In The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science, (Vol 3, 4th ed. pp. 977-979). Hokoben, NJ: John Wiley & Sons] assumes that animates (e.g., baby, rabbit presented as words or pictures) are better remembered than inanimates (e.g., bottle, mountain) because animates are more important for fitness than inanimates. In four studies, we investigated whether the animacy effect in episodic memory (i.e., the better remembering of animates over inanimates) is independent of encoding instructions. Using both a factorial (Studies 1 and 3) and a multiple regression approach (Study 2), three studies tested whether certain contexts drive people to attend to inanimate more than to animate things (or the reverse), and therefore lead to differential animacy effects. The findings showed that animacy effects on recall performance were observed in the grassland-survival scenario used by Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007. Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 33, 263-273) (Studies 1-3), when words were rated for their pleasantness (Study 2), and in explicit learning (Study 3). In the non-survival scenario of moving to a foreign land (Studies 1-2), animacy effects on recall rates were not reliable in Study 1, but were significant in Study 2, whereas these effects were reliable in the non-survival scenario of planning a trip as a tour guide (Study 3). A final (control) study (Study 4) was conducted to test specifically whether animacy effects are related to the more organised nature of animates than inanimates. Overall, the findings suggest that animacy effects are robust since they do not vary across different sets of encoding instructions (e.g., encoding for survival, preparing a trip and pleasantness).