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Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6,017 words each on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by 10 male and 10 female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system.

People have been shown to link particular sounds with particular shapes. For instance, the round-sounding nonword bouba tends to be associated with curved shapes, whereas the sharp-sounding nonword kiki is deemed to be related to angular shapes. People's tendency to associate sounds and shapes has been observed across different languages. In the present study, we reexamined the claim by Hung, Styles, and Hsieh (2017) that such sound-shape mappings can occur before an individual becomes aware of the visual stimuli. More precisely, we replicated their first experiment, in which congruent and incongruent stimuli (e.g., bouba presented in a round shape or an angular shape, respectively) were rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. The results showed that congruent combinations, on average, broke suppression faster than incongruent combinations, thus providing converging evidence for Hung and colleagues' assertions. Collectively, these findings now provide a solid basis from which to explore the boundary conditions of the effect. ispartof: Psychological Science vol:30 issue:11 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

Dishonesty is an intriguing phenomenon, studied extensively across various disciplines due to its impact on people’s lives as well as society in general. To examine dishonesty in a controlled setting, researchers have developed a number of experimental paradigms. One of the most popular approaches in this regard, is the matrix task, in which participants receive matrices wherein they have to find two numbers that sum to 10 (e.g., 4.81 and 5.19), under time pressure. In a next phase, participants need to report how many matrices they had solved correctly, allowing them the opportunity to cheat by exaggerating their performance in order to get a larger reward. Here, we argue, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, that the matrix task is ill-suited to study dishonest behavior, primarily because it conflates cheating with honest mistakes. We therefore recommend researchers to use different paradigms to examine dishonesty, and treat (previous) findings based on the matrix task with due caution. ispartof: Collabra. Psychology vol:6 issue:1 pages:1-8 status: Published online

In two studies we compare a distributional semantic model derived from word co-occurrences and a word association based model in their ability to predict properties that affect lexical processing. We focus on age of acquisition, concreteness, and three affective variables, namely valence, arousal, and dominance, since all these variables have been shown to be fundamental in word meaning. In both studies we use a model based on data obtained in a continued free word association task to predict these variables. In Study 1 we directly compare this model to a word co-occurrence model based on syntactic dependency relations to see which model is better at predicting the variables under scrutiny in Dutch. In Study 2 we replicate our findings in English and compare our results to those reported in the literature. In both studies we find the word association-based model fit to predict diverse word properties. Especially in the case of predicting affective word properties, we show that the association model is superior to the distributional model. ispartof: Journal of Cognition vol:1 issue:1 pages:1-14 ispartof: location:England status: Published online