In several regions of Spain, people speak both the regional language (e.g., Catalan or Basque) and Spanish to very high degrees. In the present study, we investigated whether LexTALE-type tests also discriminate at the high end of the proficiency range. These tests correlate well with other measures of language proficiency in unbalanced bilinguals whose second language ability is well below the level of their native language. Researchers have recently introduced various LexTALE-type word recognition tests in order to assess vocabulary size in a second language (L2) mastered by participants. The full database is available in the supplementary materials. Since the variable of semantic similarity includes a wide range of values, it can be used as either a continuous or a dichotomous variable. The present database can be a very useful tool for scientists interested in designing experiments to examine the role of semantics in language processing. In addition to the semantic similarity norms, values of concreteness and familiarity of each word in a triplet are provided. Mean comparisons revealed that participants rated the more similar words as being significantly more similar in meaning to the target word than were the less similar words. The relative distance between the two pairs for the same target ranged from 0.48 to 5.07 points. Pairs having a value of semantic similarity ranging from 5 to 9 were classified as being more semantically related, whereas those with values ranging from 2 to 4.99 were considered as being less semantically related. The degree of meaning similarity was assessed by 332 participants by using a semantic similarity rating task on a 9-point scale. Each word triplet is constituted by a target word (e.g., guisante ) and two semantically related and nonassociatively related words: a word highly related in meaning to the target (e.g., judía ), and a word less related in meaning to the target (e.g., patata ). The present study introduces the first Spanish database with normative ratings of semantic similarity for 185 word triplets. These results, which are discussed in relation to the revised hierarchical model (RHM), suggest that activation of translation equivalents is a by-product of the type of task. In contrast, there were no effects of the formal manipulation in the primed lexical decision task. Form relatedness produced a behavioral interference effect only in the translation recognition task, which was accompanied by a modulation of the LPC component. The semantic manipulation also affected the N400 component. Semantic relatedness produced a behavioral interference effect in the translation recognition task and a facilitation effect in the primed lexical decision task. Semantic and form relationships between the first and the second words were examined. Participants performed a translation recognition task (Experiment 1) or a primed lexical decision task (Experiment 2) where the relationship between the first presented (Catalan) word and the second presented (Spanish) word was manipulated. This study investigates the extent to which highly proficient Spanish–Catalan bilinguals activate Spanish translation equivalents when they are presented with Catalan words. The pattern of results was the same, regardless of translation direction and language dominance. The results showed significant effects only with form and very close semantic relations, but not in the case of less closely semantically related words. Catalan-Spanish translation direction was tested in Experiment 1 and Spanish-Catalan direction in Experiment 2. Performance of highly proficient bilinguals of Spanish and Catalan was examined in two experiments. The present experiments tested this possibility using the same materials as the previous studies but decreasing from 500 ms to 250 ms the presentation time of the word to be translated. The lack of interference in less similar words could be due to the low level of activation of the corresponding semantic representations by the time the translation decision has to be made. However, these effects are not observed when the words have a less close semantic relation (e.g., ruc-oso, donkey-bear). g., ruc-caballo, donkey-horse) produce interference effects in a translation recognition task (Ferre et al., 2006 Guasch et al., 2008). g., ruc-berro donkey-watercress) or very closely semantically related (e. Previous evidence has shown that word pairs that are either related in form (e.
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