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To test the effectiveness of the Internet-based instrument PsyToolkit for use with complex choice tasks, a replicability study was conducted wherein an existing psycholinguistic paradigm was utilised to compare results obtained through the Internet-based implementation of PsyToolkit with those obtained through the laboratory-based implementation of E-Prime 3.0. The results indicated that PsyToolkit is a viable method for conducting both general and psycholinguistic specific experiments that utilise complex response time tasks, with effects found to replicate for both response choice and response time.

Psycholinguistic approaches that study the effects of language on mental representations have ignored a potential role of the grammaticalization of the future (i.e., how the future manifests linguistically). We argue that the grammaticalization of the future may be an important aspect, as thinking about the future is omnipresent in our everyday life. The aim of this study was to experimentally manipulate the degree of future time references (i.e., present and future verb tense and temporal adverbials) to address their impact on the perceived location of future events. Across four experiments, two in French and two in German, no effect was found, irrespective of our verb and adverbial manipulations, and contrary to our hypotheses. Bayes factors confirmed that our null effects were not due to a lack of power. We present one of the first empirical accounts investigating the role of the grammaticalization of the future on effects of mental representations. We discuss possible reasons for these null results and illustrate further avenues for future research.

The role of the sensorimotor system in second language (L2) semantic processing as well as its clinical implications for bilingual patients has hitherto been neglected. We offer an overview of the issues at stake in this under-investigated field, presenting the theoretical and clinical relevance of studying L2 embodiment and reviewing the few studies on this topic. We highlight that (a) the sensorimotor network is involved in L2 processing, and that (b) in most studies, L2 is differently embodied than L1, reflected in a lower degree or in a different pattern of L2 embodiment. Importantly, we outline critical issues to be addressed in order to guide future research. We also delineate the subsequent steps needed to confirm or dismiss the value of language therapeutic approaches based on embodiment theories as a complement of speech and language therapies in adult bilinguals.

Research often conceptualises complex social factors as being distinct binary categories (e.g., female vs male, feminine vs masculine). While this can be appropriate, the addition of an ‘overlapping’ category (e.g., non-binary, gender neutral) can contextualise the ‘binary’, both for participants (allowing more complex conceptualisations of the categories than the ‘either/or’ conceptualisation in binary tasks), and for the results (by providing a neutral baseline for comparison). However, it is not clear what the best response setup for such a task would be. In this study, we explore this topic through comparing a unimanual ( N = 34) and a bimanual response setup ( N = 32) for use with a three-alternative choice response time task. Crucially, one of the stimulus categories (‘mixed’) was composed of stimulus elements from the other two stimulus categories used in that task (Complex Task). A reference button task was included to isolate the motoric component of response registration (Simple Task). The results of the simple task indicated lower motoric costs for the unimanual compared to the bimanual setup. However, when statistically controlling for these motoric costs in the complex task, the bimanual setup had a lower error rate and faster response times than the unimanual setup. Further, in the complex task error rates and response times were higher for the mixed than the matched stimuli, indicating that responding to mixed stimuli is more challenging for encoding and/or decision making processes. This difference was more pronounced in the unimanual than the bimanual setup. Taken together these results indicate that the unimanual setup is more adequate for the reference button task, whereas the intricacy of overlapping categories in the complex task is better contained in the bimanual setup, i.e. when some response alternatives are allocated to one hand and other alternatives to the other hand.

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/ ) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of women or men following a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants’ proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language.

This study investigated readers' representations of the main protagonist's emotional status in short narratives, as well as several mental factors that may affect these representations. General and visuospatial working memory, empathy, and simulation were investigated as potential individual differences in generating emotional inferences. Participants were confronted with narratives conveying information about the protagonist's emotional state. We manipulated each narrative's target sentence according to its content (emotional label vs. description of the behaviour associated to the emotion) and its congruence to the story (matching vs. mismatching). The results showed that globally the difference between reading times of congruent and incongruent target sentences was bigger in the behavioural than in the emotional condition. This pattern was accentuated for high visuospatial working memory participants when they were asked to simulate the stories. These results support the idea that mental models may be of a perceptual nature and may more likely include behavioural elements than emotion labels per se, as suggested earlier by Gygax et al. (2007). Cette étude examine les représentations que se font les lecteurs et les lectrices de l'état émotionnel du personnage principal lors de la lecture de courtes histoires narrative ainsi que plusieurs facteurs mentaux qui pourraient influencer ces représentations. La mémoire de travail générale et visuospatiale, l'empathie et la simulation ont été examinées en tant que différences individuelles dans l'élaboration des inférences émotionnelles. Les participant-e-s ont lu de courtes histoires contenant de l'information au sujet de l'état émotionnel du ou de la protagoniste. La phrase cible de chaque histoire était manipulée selon son contenu (désignation de l'émotion vs description du comportement associé à l'émotion) et sa pertinence dans l'histoire (congruente et incongruente). Les résultats révèlent que, dans l'ensemble, la différence entre le temps de lecture des phrases cibles congruentes et incongruentes était plus grande dans la condition « comportement » que dans la condition « émotion ». Cette tendance était plus accentuée chez les participant-e-s à la mémoire de travail visuospatiale élevée lorsqu'il leur était demandé de simuler les histoires. Ces résultats appuient l'idée selon laquelle les modèles mentaux pourraient être de nature perceptive et pourraient probablement inclure des éléments comportementaux plutôt que des émotions à proprement parler, comme l'ont suggéré Gygax et al. (2007).

A good knowledge of connectives like moreover and therefore is crucial for reading comprehension and academic success, yet not all connectives, especially infrequent connectives mostly used in writing, are well mastered even by adults. The main goal of this paper is to assess the possibility to improve the ability to use connectives in discourse during the transitional teenage years. To do so, we examined whether 228 native French-speaking teenagers and 60 adults improved their performance with eight infrequent (prototypical and non-prototypical) connectives in a sentence-completion task after active or passive training. The results revealed that training had only a limited effect on the ability to use both types of connectives, while the degree of exposure to print was an important predictor of individual variations. These findings suggest that connectives’ mastery depends more on exposure to extensive written input that allows to internalize their procedural meaning over time rather than on one-time explicit activation of the mapping between their form and function.

The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many have argued for the existence of gender inequality in grant peer reviews and outcomes, others have demonstrated that gender equality is upheld during these processes. In the present paper, we illustrate how these opinions have come to such opposing conclusions and consider methodological and contextual factors that render these findings inconclusive. More specifically, we argue that a more comprehensive approach is needed to further the debate, encompassing individual and systemic biases as well as more global social barriers. We also argue that examining gender biases during the peer review process of research grant funding poses critical methodological challenges that deserve special attention. We conclude by providing directions for possible future research and more general considerations that may improve grant funding opportunities and career paths for female researchers.

To test the effectiveness of the Internet-based instrument PsyToolkit for use with complex choice tasks, a replicability study was conducted wherein an existing psycholinguistic paradigm was utilised to compare results obtained through the Internet-based implementation of PsyToolkit with those obtained through the laboratory-based implementation of E-Prime 3.0. The results indicated that PsyToolkit is a viable method for conducting both general and psycholinguistic specific experiments that utilise complex response time tasks, with effects found to replicate for both response choice and response time.