In their latest publication, Prof. Guillaume Thierry and Dr. Rafał Jończyk with their team demonstrate that negative emotions conveyed through nonverbal stimuli (images) can block access to first language (L1) representations in bilinguals!

➡ Head to: doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

Last week I had the pleasure of sharing my experience with Open Science during a workshop organised at Bordeaux Neurocampus. I had a great time talking about pre-registration and how planning ahead helps us do better research. Thank you again for inviting me!

We found that in an incidental memory task, body-related information still increased false alarms, supporting the somatic attention account.
The findings highlight the importance of distinctiveness in word memory and the complex role of semantic richness effects in memory.
7/7

Alternatively, the somatic attention account suggests that attending to body-related content leads to automatic activation of additional bodily experiences (such as touch or proprioception), increasing memory confusability.
6/7

There are two potential explanations: Since body information is critical for survival, it's possible that semantic elaboration during (expected) memory tasks activates a broad range of related information, leading to more confusable memory traces.
5/7

Second paper: our first Registered Report!🎯
We examined incidental memory for words to test two competing ideas about effects of body-related information.
sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Previous work showed that body-related experience impairs word memory by inflating false alarms...
4/7

This allowed us to tap into more distant associates and individual variation in the trajectory of responses. Local chaining with the preceding response was the strongest source of activation throughout the task, although the cue provided a global constraint.
3/7

We found that linguistic information from an immediately preceding response (rather than the cue) was the primary driver of associations, with some contribution of immediate sensorimotor relationships.
We asked participants to produce 20 associates per cue...
2/7

April was a great month for publications! 🌸
Two new papers with @louiseconnell.bsky.social
are now out in open access (with prereg, open data & materials) - here’s a quick rundown. 🧵
First up: what drives activation in a word association task?
sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Bonus: Word knowledge task (asking if participants know the meaning of the word) seems to tap into similar mechanisms as word recognition (determining whether the stimulus is a real word). 3/3
@wauampoznan.bsky.social
@cambup-linguistics.bsky.social

Non-native speakers rely more on lexical characteristics and familiarity with the word form than on deep semantic processing. Bodily sensation and experience also contributed to reported word knowledge, suggesting that embodied cognition plays a role in L2 processing. 2/3

New paper alert! A large-scale comparison of word knowledge in native vs. non-native English speakers reveals key differences in sensorimotor and lexical contributions to language processing. Open access in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition bit.ly/3QXQuxi 🧵1/3

This is a very nice explanation of when it's a good time to post a preprint.
Personally, I like to do it at the stage of first submission, but any time is good to make your work freely accessible!