Gabriel versus París: el reconocimiento de los nombres propios en español

Abstract

The processing and representation of proper nouns have traditionally been studied by comparing them to common nouns. However, lately many authors from the field of psycholinguistics and neuroscience are showing an increased interest in studying how different subcategories of proper nouns, such as human nouns or geographic nouns, may present different behaviors and characteristics. The present study approaches this issue through a double lens: (1) the semantic and associative characteristics of personal versus geographic nouns and (2) the recognition of these two types of words. Our results demonstrate that personal nouns have more idiosyncratic associates than geographic nouns, while the strength of the first associate is higher for the latter. The differences observed at the descriptive level result in divergent patterns of results of both types of words in a lexical decision task that was specifically designed to test this hypothesis. Indeed, participants processed personal nouns significantly faster than geographic nouns, which indicate that geographic nouns seem to be an intermediate category that shares semantic characteristics both with common nouns and personal nouns.