This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/.

In recent decades several authors have suggested that bilinguals exhibit enhanced cognitive control as compared to monolinguals and some proposals suggest that this main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is related to bilinguals’ enhanced capacity of inhibiting irrelevant information. This has led to the proposal of the so-called bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on the locus and generality of the alleged bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. In the current study we investigated inhibitory skills in a large sample of 252 monolingual and 252 bilingual children who were carefully matched on a large number of indices. We tested their performance in a verbal Stroop task and in a nonverbal version of the same task (the number size-congruency task). Results were unequivocal and showed that bilingual and monolingual participants performed equally in these two tasks across all the indices or markers of inhibitory skills explored. Furthermore, the lack of differences between monolingual and bilingual children extended to all the age ranges tested and was not modulated by any of the independent factors investigated. In light of these results, we conclude that bilingual children do not exhibit any specific advantage in simple inhibitory tasks as compared to monolinguals.

The role of grammatical gender and number representations in syntactic processes during reading in Spanish was studied using the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. The electroencephalogram was recorded with a dense array of 128 electrodes while Spanish speakers read word pairs (Experiment 1) or sentences (Experiment 2) in which gender or number agreement relationships were manipulated. Disagreement in word pairs formed by a noun and an adjective (e.g., faro–alto [lighthouse–high]) produced an N400-type effect, while word pairs formed by an article and a noun (e.g., el–piano [the-piano]) showed an additional left anterior negativity effect (LAN). Agreement violations with the same words inserted in sentences (e.g., El piano estaba viejo y desafinado [the m-s piano m-s was old m-s and off-key]) resulted in a pattern of LAN–P600. This effect was found both when the violation occurred in the middle of the sentence (at the adjective), as well as when this happened at the beginning of the sentence (at the noun), but the last segment of the P600 effect was greater for the middle sentence position, which could indicate differences in the complexity of reanalysis processes. Differences between grammatical gender and number disagreement were found in late measures. In the word pairs experiment, P3 peak latency varied across conditions, being later for gender than for number disagreement. Similarly, in the sentence experiment, the last segment of the P600 effect was greater for gender than for number violations. These event-related potentials (ERPs) effects lend support to the idea that reanalysis or repair processes after grammatical disagreement detection could involve more steps in the case of gender disagreement, as grammatical gender is a feature of the lexical representation in contrast to number, which is considered a morphological feature that combines with the stem of the word.