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In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the effects of two variables related to word-type. We tested proficient unbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked translation priming paradigm conducted in the two translation directions (L1 to L2, and L2 to L1), by orthogonally manipulating for the first time concreteness and cognate status. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was also manipulated (50 ms vs 100 ms). Results revealed modulations in masked priming effects as a function of cognate status and translation direction. However, the effect of concreteness was only observed at the long SOA. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant models of bilingual memory, mainly the Distributed Feature Model (de Groot, 1992a).

This study presents semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words. Two subjective measures of semantic ambiguity and two subjective measures of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings were collected. In addition, two objective measures of semantic ambiguity were included. Furthermore, subjective ratings were obtained for some relevant lexicosemantic variables, such as concreteness, familiarity, emotional valence, arousal, and age of acquisition. In sum, the database overcomes some of the limitations of the published databases of Spanish ambiguous words; in particular, the scarcity of measures of ambiguity, the lack of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings measures, and the absence of a set of unambiguous words. Thus, it will be very helpful for researchers interested in exploring semantic ambiguity as well as for those using semantic ambiguous words to study language processing in clinical populations.

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Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393-1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm interacts with statistical learning and speech perception. Past results with this monitoring technique have pointed to an end-of-clause effect in parsing-a structural effect-but we here show that the issues are a bit more nuanced. Firstly, we report two Experiments (1a and 1b), which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: (a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and (b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover helps neutralize differences between sentences with slightly different structures. These two factors are then successfully discriminated by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a monitoring task, with Experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components-the first associated with temporal uncertainty, the second with processing load in dual tasks-correlate with RTs. Finally, Experiment 3 behaviorally segregates the two factors by placing the last tone at the end of sentences, activating a wrap-up operation and thereby both disrupting the decreasing tendency and highlighting structural effects. Our overall results suggest that much care needs to be employed in designing click-detection tasks if structural effects are sought, and some of the now-classic data need to be reconsidered.