Disorders of the Nervous System
Author: Pamela Lopes da Cunha | Email: pamelopes@gmail.com
Pamela Lopes da Cunha1°, Agustina Selser1°, Lucia Amoruso1°2°, Adolfo Garcia1°3°4°
1° Centro de Neurociencias Cognitivas, Universidad de San Andres
2° Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language.
3° Global Brain Health Institute
4° Depto de Linguistica y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades, U. de Santiago de Chile
Social concepts, which describe characteristics and circumstances in interpersonal scenarios, are crucial for human communication and relationships. Poor social interaction could even affect mental health. Our team has identified specific linguistic alterations linked to neurodegenerative disorders and aims to study these phenomena in social cognition. Studies on social concepts require systematically validated normative databases; these have been used to research word recognition and prevalence and how socialness, concreteness, or emotional valence relate to word meaning and behaviour. However, no psycholinguistic normative database for social concepts exists in Spanish, precluding theoretical and translational advances in Latin populations. Here, participants will complete an online form, rating Spanish nouns, verbs and adjectives, based on the social relevance of their meaning. A total of 600 words, randomly divided into subsets of 100, will be presented to participants. Then, words with high and low sociality (such as “friendship” and “cooperate” or “button” and “vibrate”, respectively) will be established. Once validated, this database will facilitate using these words and manipulating the “sociality” variable in various linguistic tasks, combined with tools like natural language processing, fMRI, and tDCS, for a comprehensive study of social concepts in Spanish.