0000000000222753
AUTHOR
María Fernández-lópez
showing 12 related works from this author
Does orthographic processing emerge rapidly after learning a new script?
2021
Epub 2020 Aug 11 Orthographic processing is characterized by location-invariant and location-specific processing (Grainger, 2018): (1) strings of letters are more vulnerable to transposition effects than the strings of symbols in same-different tasks (location-invariant processing); and (2) strings of letters, but not strings of symbols, show an initial position advantage in target-in-string identification tasks (location-specific processing). To examine the emergence of these two markers of orthographic processing, we conducted a same-different task and a target-in-string identification task with two unfamiliar scripts (pre-training experiments). Across six training sessions, participants …
Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?
2021
Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…
Unveiling the boost in the sandwich priming technique.
2021
The masked priming technique (which compares #####-house-HOUSE vs. #####-fight-HOUSE) is the gold-standard tool to examine the initial moments of word processing. Lupker and Davis showed that adding a pre-prime identical to the target produced greater priming effects in the sandwich technique (which compares #####-HOUSE-house-HOUSE vs #####-HOUSE-fight-HOUSE). While there is consensus that the sandwich technique magnifies the size of priming effects relative to the standard procedure, the mechanisms underlying this boost are not well understood (i.e., does it reflect quantitative or qualitative changes?). To fully characterise the sandwich technique, we compared the sandwich and standard t…
¿Cuátna prátcica letcora hace fatla praa que poadmos leer palbraas con lertas trasnpuetsas?
2020
Las letras son estímulos visuales especiales. Inmersas en palabras, nos cuesta mucho distinguir “cedro” de “cerdo”, lo cual se conoce como efecto de transposición. Este efecto sucede en menor grado con secuencias de dígitos o símbolos. ¿Cuándo comienzan las letras a tener ese estatus especial? En un experimento reciente de nuestro laboratorio demostramos que seis días de práctica intensiva no son suficientes, pero ya permiten vislumbrar los inicios de un procesamiento especial de las letras.
What is the letter é?
2019
Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed th...
¿Son necesarios los acentos gráficos en español o es tiempo de jubilarlos?
2021
La acentuación gráfica (tildes) en español es un tema que genera controversia entre los expertos. Partiendo del diferente (des)uso de los acentos gráficos en diferentes lenguas, nos cuestionamos si estos realmente ayudan a la identificación de palabras durante la lectura en español. Investigaciones recientes muestran que la omisión de los acentos gráficos en palabras no conlleva un coste en la lectura respecto a aquellas palabras escritas con sus correspondientes tildes. ¿Estaremos ante la decadencia del acento gráfico en español?
Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?
2020
AbstractPrior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target…
Which Factors Modulate Letter Position Coding in Pre-literate Children?
2021
One of the central landmarks of learning to read is the emergence of orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of letter identity and letter order): it constitutes the necessary link between the low-level stages of visual processing and the higher-level processing of words. Regarding the processing of letter position, many experiments have shown worse performance in various tasks for the transposed-letter pair judge-JUDGE than for the orthographic control jupte-JUDGE. Importantly, 4-y.o. pre-literate children also show letter transposition effects in a same-different task: TZ-ZT is more error-prone than TZ-PH. Here, we examined whether this effect with pre-literate children is related to …
The bilingualism wars: Is the bilingual advantage out of (executive) control?
2019
espanolUno de los temas actuales mas controvertidos en psicologia cognitiva y neurociencia cognitiva es si el bilinguismo tiene un efecto sobre el control ejecutivo de las representaciones no verbales. En su vida diaria, los bilingues tienen que alternar entre dos (o mas) idiomas que compiten por su seleccion, por lo que han de seleccionar, monitorizar e inhibir (es decir, emplear componentes de la funcion ejecutiva) con mas frecuencia que los monolingues. Por lo tanto, no seria sorprendente que estas habilidades empleadas para seleccionar/monitorear los procesos linguisticos en bilingues tambien ayudaran al procesamiento de representaciones no linguisticas. Aunque la "ventaja bilingue" en …
The Omission of Accent Marks Does Not Hinder Word Recognition: Evidence From Spanish
2021
Recent research has found that the omission of accent marks in Spanish does not produce slower word identification times in go/no-go lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks [e.g., cárcel (prison) = carcel], thus suggesting that vowels like á and a are represented by the same orthographic units during word recognition and reading. However, there is a discrepant finding with the yes/no lexical decision task, where the words with the omitted accent mark produced longer response times than the words with the accent mark. In Experiment 1, we examined this discrepant finding by running a yes/no lexical decision experiment comparing the effects for words and non-words. Results showed sl…
Language does not modulate fake news credibility, but emotion does
2020
Abstract The proliferation of fake news in internet requires understanding which factors modulate their credibility and take actions to limit their impact. A number of recent studies have shown an effect of the foreign language when making decisions: reading in a foreign language engages a more rational, analytic mode of thinking (Costa et al., 2014, Cognition). This analytic mode of processing may lead to a decrease in the credibility of fake news. Here we conducted two experiments to examine whether fake news stories presented to university students were more credible in the native language than in a foreign language. Bayesian analyses in both experiments offered support for the hypothesi…
¿Podemos agilizar la lectura en aprendices de chino?
2018
Una de las dificultades que conlleva el aprendizaje del chino es que las palabras escritas no están delimitadas. Una estrategia para minimizar dicha dificultad es añadir espacios entre palabras, pero ello genera un patrón alterado de los movimientos oculares que reduce la eficiencia del procesamiento visual. Una mejor opción es colorear alternadamente las palabras de un texto. Esta manipulación produce tiempos de lectura más rápidos en lectores principiantes de chino y ayuda en textos con palabras poco familiares en lectores adultos. Por tanto, la coloración alternada es una buena opción para agilizar el aprendizaje lector en chino.