(2019). El español en la era global: agentes y voces de la polifonía panhispánica. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching: Vol. 6, Spanish in the global era: ideology, language varieties and curriculum design / El español en la era global: ideología, modelos de lengua y diseño curricular, pp. 79-95.

En Psicolingüística y Lingüística computacional las pruebas de libre asociación de palabras han servido tradicionalmente como fuente de datos para desarrollar redes conceptuales que, de diferente forma, simulan el espacio semántico mental de los hablantes de una lengua. La modelación de las redes léxicas se articula habitualmente a través de valores como el número de asociados de cada palabra, la fuerza asociativa y otra serie de factores cuantitativos de diversa índole. Menos abundante es, sin embargo, el número de estudios que cuantifican el entorno de una palabra a través del tipo de relaciones asociativas. Este trabajo realiza un análisis exploratorio de las relaciones semántico-asociativas de 150 palabras en español partiendo de una prueba de libre asociación discreta, con el objetivo de proponer una clasificación de las palabras por medio de las técnicas de los mapas auto-organizados (SOM), con el objetivo de que tanto las variables resultantes basadas en los tipos de asociados como la clasificación de palabras propuesta puedan utilizarse como variables independientes en estudios de psicolingüística experimental, para observar si características semánticas de corte asociativo influyen de algún modo en tareas de procesamiento lingüístico.

Previous studies analysing the differences in emotionality in first and second language suggest that affective content of lexical items is modulated in certain contexts. This paper investigates the differences in valence and arousal ratings for 300 early words, in both oral and written modalities, through speakers’ subjective appraisal of words given by two immersion groups of Spanish late bilinguals (Chinese and European) compared with a group of native speakers. The main goal of our study is to identify the lexical areas where variability occurs, regarding to a set of affective (emotional charge and intensity), grammatical (nouns, adjectives and verbs) and semantic (concreteness) features of words. Our results show that valence is the dimension where the greatest variability is observed between native and bilinguals, although the influence of the independent factors differs considerably. Besides, arousal yields illuminating data regarding the grammatical category of words and differentiation between the groups of participants.

The study of proper names, especially from the point of view of its evolution and the different social values developed over time, has presented obvious difficulties. In the present research we approach a socio-onomastic analysis of the anthroponyms from the methodological principles of lexical availability and on the basis of a sample geographically restricted and with homogeneous distribution of different social parameters (age, gender and socio-cultural level). Firstly, the results confirm the suitability of the procedure when detecting schemes and models of onomastic habits, as well as the possibility of comparison with other existing frequency counts. Secondly, from the quantitative analysis, it is possible to detect differentiated behaviours among groups that result from the stratification of the sample from which we can trace trends and patterns in the social set.

Categorization is a dynamic cognitive process that organizes human knowledge. As such, categorization processes are integral of the linguistic system and are primarily manifested in the conceptual categories represented in semantic memory. Linguistic theory has proposed various models to describe the nature and structure of semantic categories. This paper reviews the traditional definitions of four types of linguistic categories (natural or taxonomic, ad hoc, radial and scripts) from the complex network paradigm. The semantic networks have been constructed from a semantic fluency task (Animals, Objects laid on the table, Games and Countryside) involving 680 native Spanish speakers. Both the structure of the network and its dynamics are analysed, remarking the process by which speakers create the network through their linguistic performance. For this purpose, traditional mathematical measures from network theory were employed, and new measures were proposed to more precisely distinguish between the four types of categories. The results support the principles of linguistic description, expanding and refining the properties of the different types of semantic categories. Furthermore, they highlight the importance of fine-grained modularity measures as key to interpreting differences in conceptual categories.