This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits. Apart from the high number of variables evaluated, knowing that it affects the processing of stimuli, this new set presents important advantages over other similar image corpi: (a) this corpus presents a broad number of subcategories and images; for example, this will permit researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required, (e.g., to deal with problems derived from ceiling effects); (b) the fact of using coloured stimuli provides a more realistic, ecologically-valid, representation of real life objects. In sum, this set of stimuli provides a useful tool for research on visual object-and word- processing, both in neurological patients and in healthy controls.

Our main objective was to analyse the different contributions of relational verbal reasoning (analogical and class inclusion) and executive functioning to metaphor comprehension across development. We postulated that both relational reasoning and executive functioning should predict individual and developmental differences. However, executive functioning would become increasingly involved when metaphor comprehension is highly demanding, either because of the metaphors’ high difficulty (relatively novel metaphors in the absence of a context) or because of the individual’s special processing difficulties, such as low levels of reading experience or low semantic knowledge. Three groups of participants, 11-year-olds, 15-year-olds and young adults, were assessed in different relational verbal reasoning tasks—analogical and class-inclusion—and in executive functioning tasks—updating information in working memory, inhibition, and shifting. The results revealed clear progress in metaphor comprehension between ages 11 and 15 and between ages 15 and 21. However, the importance of executive function in metaphor comprehension was evident by age 15 and was restricted to updating information in working memory and cognitive inhibition. Participants seemed to use two different strategies to interpret metaphors: relational verbal reasoning and executive functioning. This was clearly shown when comparing the performance of the "more efficient" participants in metaphor interpretation with that of the "less efficient” ones. Whereas in the first case none of the executive variables or those associated with relational verbal reasoning were significantly related to metaphor comprehension, in the latter case, both groups of variables had a clear predictor effect.

Updating information in working memory (WM) is a critical executive function responsible both for continuously replacing outdated information with new relevant data and to suppress or inhibit content that is no longer relevant according to task demands. The goal of the present research is twofold: First, we aimed to study updating development in 548 participants of 4 different age ranges--7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and young adults--using the updating task devised by R. De Beni and P. Palladino (2004), which allows differentiating maintenance and inhibition processes. Second, we attempted to determine the relation between these processes across development as well as the differentiation among different types of inhibition processes tapped by this task. Results showed that there was an improvement of memory performance with age along with an upgrading of inhibitory efficiency. However, whereas in memory performance, a progressive increase was observed until the age of 15 years followed by stabilization, in inhibition, a continuous progressive increase was observed until young adulthood. Importantly, results showed that development of the different inhibitory mechanisms does not progress equally. All the groups committed more errors related to inefficient suppression mechanisms in WM than errors related to control of long-term memory interference. Principal component analysis showed that updating implies different subprocesses: active maintenance/suppression of information in WM and control of proactive interference. Developmental trajectories showed that the maintenance/suppression of information in the WM component continues to develop far beyond adolescence but that proactive interference control is responsible for variations in updating across development.

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.