ABSTRACT-After immersion in a foreign language, speakers often have difficulty retrieving native-language words-a phenomenon known as first-language attrition. We propose that first-language attrition arises in part from the suppression of native-language phonology during second-language use, and thus is a case of phonological retrieval-induced forgetting. In two experiments, we investigated this hypothesis by having native English speakers name visual objects in a language they were learning (Spanish). Repeatedly naming the objects in Spanish reduced the accessibility of the corresponding English words, as measured by an independent-probe test of inhibition. The results establish that the phonology of the words was inhibited, as access to the concepts underlying the presented objects was facilitated, not impaired. More asymmetry between English and Spanish fluency was associated with more inhibition for native-language words. This result supports the idea that inhibition plays a functional role in overcoming interference during the early stages of second-language acquisition.

Recent data (T. J. Perfect, C. J. A. Moulin, M. A. Conway, & E. Perry, 2002) have suggested that retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) depends on conceptual memory because the effect is not found in perceptually driven tasks. In 3 experiments, the authors aimed to show that the presence of RIF depends on whether the procedure induces appropriate transfer between representations and competition rather than on the nature of the final test. The authors adapted the standard paradigm to introduce lexical categories (words that shared the first 2 letters) at study and practice. Direct and indirect fragment completion tests were used at retrieval. The results showed significant RIF effects in perceptually driven tasks. Furthermore, they indicated that the presence of RIF effects depended on using adequate cuing to induce competition during the retrieval practice and on the final memory test tapping the inhibited representation.

These findings suggest that the Distractor Devaluation effect previously reported in the attention field can be generalized to memory. This is one the first studies to show an influence of memory processes, namely forgetting, on emotion.

Memory retrieval is often challenged by other irrelevant competing memories that cause interference. This phenomenon is typically studied with the retrieval practice paradigm in which a category cue (e.g., Fruits) is presented together with an item-specific cue (e.g., Or::). Presentation of the category cue usually induces interference by reactivating competing memories (e.g., Banana, Apple, etc.), which is thought to be solved by means of inhibition, leading to retrieval-induced forgetting of these competing memories. Previous studies associated interference with an increase in medial prefrontal theta band (4-8 Hz) oscillations, but these studies could not disentangle the interference from the inhibition processes. We here used a retrieval practice procedure in which the category cue was presented before the item-specific cue to disentangle the interference from the inhibition signal. Furthermore, a competitive retrieval condition was contrasted with a noncompetitive condition. At a behavioral level, retrieval-induced forgetting was found in the competitive but not in the noncompetitive condition. At a neural level, presentation of the category cue elicited higher levels of theta power in the competitive condition, when compared with the noncompetitive retrieval condition. Importantly, this difference was localized to the ACC, which has been associated with the detection and mediation of interference. Additionally, theta power decreased upon presentation of the item-specific cue, and this difference was related to later forgetting. Our results therefore disentangle, for the first time, interference and inhibition in episodic memory retrieval and suggest that theta oscillations track the fine-grained temporal dynamics of interference during competitive memory retrieval.

Knowledge of specific characteristics of verbal material is imperative in cognitive research, and this need calls for periodical updating of normative data. With this aim, and considering that the most recent Spanish-language category norms for adults date back to more than 30 years ago, and that they do not include some very common categories, a new normative study was conducted. In this study, production data for exemplars in the 56 categories of Battig and Montague (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80, 1-46, 1969) were collected from a pool of 284 young adults who were native speakers of Spanish using an exemplar production task. With the goal of providing a useful tool for cognitive research to be conducted with Spanish-speaking samples, indices of frequency, rank, and lexical availability for the exemplars of each category are provided in a computerized database. The norms described are available for downloading as supplemental material with this article.

Studies of sentence comprehension that have employed different methodologies, tasks, and modes of language processing converge on the conclusion that a verb's subcategorization frame and subcategorization frequency influence reading speed and processing difficulty during sentence comprehension (e.g., Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; Hare, McRae, & Elman, 2003;MacDonald, 1994;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a, 1994bTrueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993;. The term subcategorization frame denotes the order and category of the constituentsfor example, noun phrase (NP), prepositional phrase (PP), adverbial phrase (AdvP), complementizer phrase (CP)-co-occurring with particular verbs. Thus, believe can occur in the slots in one of the following subcategorization frames: NP__ NP (John believes the story); NP__CP (John believes that the story was true); NP__ PP (John believes in Mary); or NP__AdvP (John believes so). Subcategorization frequency-also referred to in the psycholinguistic literature as verb bias-refers to a verb's preferential subcategorization frame. In the example above, believe not only subcategorizes for different types of complements, but also appears with each complement with different probabilities. According to some sources (e.g., Gahl, Jurafsky, & Roland, Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world's population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish-English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show...

Research on familiar faces has recurrently been conducted in different domains, such as, psycholinguistics, memory, attention, face processing, aging studies, etc. In general, photographs of celebrities, their proper names, or their occupations have been the materials mainly employed in those types of studies. These stimuli are, however, very constrained by the geographic and sociocultural contexts in which the studies are conducted, and, in spite of their relevance for psychological research, there are no normative studies for celebrities in Spain. With the aim of filling this gap, the photographs and names of the 118 most frequently produced celebrities in Spain were collected. For each celebrity, values for 13 different indices (including psycholinguistic properties, naming times, and emotional indicators) were obtained from a young adult Spanish sample. Regression analyses on the data indicated that the main determinant in naming times and ToTs was the percentage of correct responses. Face agreement was also a significant predictor of ToTs. Results were compared with previous celebrity norms in other languages, and discussed in relation to the current models of face processing. These norms are likely to make a useful contribution to the design of more controlled research and applied tools in Psychology.

A current debate regarding face and object naming concerns whether they are equally vulnerable to semantic interference. Although some studies have shown similar patterns of interference, others have revealed different effects for faces and objects. In Experiment 1, we compared face naming to object naming when exemplars were presented in a semantically homogeneous context (grouped by their category) or in a semantically heterogeneous context (mixed) across four cycles. The data revealed significant slowing for both face and object naming in the homogeneous context. This semantic interference was explained as being due to lexical competition from the conceptual activation of category members. When focusing on the first cycle, a facilitation effect for objects but not for faces appeared. This result permits us to explain the previously observed discrepancies between face and object naming. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, with the exception that half of the stimuli were presented as face/object names for reading. Semantic interference was present for both face and object naming, suggesting that faces and objects behave similarly during naming. Interestingly, during reading, semantic interference was observed for face names but not for object names. This pattern is consistent with previous assumptions proposing the activation of a person identity during face name reading.