BACKGROUND: For decades researchers assumed visual image generation was the province of the right hemisphere. The lack of corresponding evidence was only recently noted, yet conflicting results still leave open the possibility that the right hemisphere plays a role. This study assessed imagery generation in adult participants with and without right hemisphere damage (RHD). Imagery was operation...

In spite of their unusual orthographic and phonological form, acronyms (e.g., BBC, HIV, NATO) can become familiar to the reader, and their meaning can be accessed well enough that they are understood. The factors in semantic access for acronym stimuli were assessed using a word association task. Two analyses examined the time taken to generate a word association response to acronym cues. Respon...

It has been claimed that the frequency eŒect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear eŒect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisitio...

Abstract The role of morphemes in lexical recognition has been extensively explored recent years, although the evidence from older adults is extremely scarce. In this study, we carry out a decision task to assess interference generated by morphological composition pseudo-words (i.e., longer and more error prone decisions on made up comparison without appearance) group young (mean = 74 years). r...

Psychologists have argued that visual imagery plays a vital role in human reasoning. If so, then reasoning with materials that are easy to visualize should be better than reasoning with materials that are hard to visualize. The literature, however, reports inconsistent results. Our starting point was that the inconsistencies arise from confounding imageability with the spatial nature of the mat...

The contents and structure of semantic networks have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely brought together. Here, starting from a standard textual model of semanti...

This article describes our novel approach to the automated detection and analysis of metaphors in text. We employ robust, quantitative language processing to implement a system prototype combined with sound social science methods for validation. We show results in 4 different languages and discuss how our methods are a significant step forward from previously established techniques of metaphor ...

The present article provides Spanish norms for name agreement, printed word frequency, word compound frequency, familiarity, imageability, visual complexity, age of acquisition, and word length (measured by syllables and phonemes) for 100 line drawings of actions taken from Druks and Masterson (2000). In addition, through a naming-time experiment carried out with a group of 54 Spanish students ...

This article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants' assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Apart from these dimensions, five ob...