Publications  

Preregistration: The interplay between linguistic and embodied systems in conceptual processing

This preregistration outlines a study that will investigate the dynamic nature of conceptual processing by examining the interplay …
Bernabeu, P., Lynott, D., & Connell, L.
2021 conceptual processing, individual differences, psycholinguistics
PDF Code Dataset Project DOI

Investigating object orientation effects across 14 languages

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of real objects. …
Chen, S.-C., Szabelzka, A., Chartier, C. R., Kekecs, Z., Lynott, D., Bernabeu, P. … Schmidt, K.
2020 Conditionally accepted in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review conceptual processing, individual differences, conceptual replication
PDF Code Dataset Video DOI

More refined typology and design in linguistic relativity: the case of motion event encoding

Linguistic relativity is the influence of language on other realms of cognition. For instance, the way movement is expressed in a …
Bernabeu, P., & Tillman, R.
2019 Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics linguistic relativity
PDF Poster DOI

Dutch modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts

Part of the toolkit of language researchers is formed of stimuli that have been rated on various dimensions. The current study presents …
Bernabeu, P.
2018 linguistic materials, conceptual replication
PDF Code Dataset Data dashboard

Modality switch effects emerge early and increase throughout conceptual processing: evidence from ERPs

We tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tracking the time course of the Conceptual Modality Switch effect. …
Bernabeu, P., Willems, R. M., & Louwerse, M. M.
2017 In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. J. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1629-1634). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. conceptual processing, conceptual replication
PDF Code Dataset Poster DOI Stimulus data dashboard Results data dashboard Master's thesis

Modality switches occur early and extend late in conceptual processing: evidence from ERPs [Master's thesis]

The engagement of sensory brain regions during word recognition is widely documented, yet its precise relevance is less clear. It would …
Bernabeu, P.
2017 conceptual processing, psycholinguistics, event-related potentials
PDF Code Dataset Poster Stimulus data dashboard Results data dashboard Conference paper

Language evolution: current status and future directions

The topic of language evolution is characterised by the scarcity of records, but also by a large flow of research produced within …
Bernabeu, P., & Vogt, P.
2015 Tenth Language at the University of Essex (LangUE) Postgraduate Conference evolution of language
PDF

Web applications and dashboards  

WebVTT caption transcription app

This open-source, R-based web application allows the conversion of video captions (subtitles) from the Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) …
2021 research and teaching applications

Web application for the simulation of experimental data

This open-source, R-based web application is suitable for educational or research purposes in experimental sciences. It allows the …
Bernabeu, P., & Lynott, D.
2020 research and teaching applications

Butterfly species richness in Los Angeles

Dashboard with open data from a study by Prudic et al. (2018), that compares citizen science with traditional methods in butterfly …
2020 data visualisation

Dutch modality exclusivity norms

This app presents linguistic data over several tabs. The code combines the great front-end of Flexdashboard—based on R Markdown and …
2018 linguistic materials, research methods

Modality switch effects emerge early and increase throughout conceptual processing: evidence from ERPs

We tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tracking the time course of the Conceptual Modality Switch effect. …
2017 conceptual processing

Workshops

Introduction to R, statistics, visualisation, reproducible documents, web applications and dashboards, HTML, CSS, web hosting (further details).

Date Title Event and location Registration
Aug 2020 Open data and reproducibility: R Markdown, data dashboards and Binder v2.1 (co-led with Florencia D’Andrea) CarpentryCon@Home, The Carpentries [online] Link
July 2020 Open data and reproducibility: R Markdown, data dashboards and Binder (co-led with Eirini Zormpa) UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, University of Birmingham [online] Link
May 2020 R Markdown Lancaster University [online]

Presentations

Date Type Title Event and location
May 2021 Talk Linguistic and embodied systems in conceptual processing: Variation across individuals and items Lancaster University Postgraduate Psychology Conference 2021
May 2021 Talk Towards reproducibility and maximally-open data Open Science Week 2021, Open Scholarship Community Galway
Nov 2020 Talk Mixed-effects models in R, and a new tool for data simulation New Tricks Seminars, Dept. Psychology, Lancaster University
Oct 2020 Talk Reproducibilidad en torno a una aplicación web Reprohack en español, LatinR Conference 2020
Apr 2020 Talk Embedding open research and reproducibility in the UG and PGT curricula (with Andrew Stewart and Phil McAleer) Collaborations Workshop, Software Sustainability Institute
Event cancelled Talk Open Data and Reproducibility v2.0 SatRday, Newcastle University
Dec 2018 Talk Presenting data interactively online using R Shiny Research Software Forum, Lancaster University
Nov 2018 Talk Linguistic and embodied systems in conceptual processing: Role of individual differences Psychology postgraduate medley, Lancaster University
Jan 2017 x2, Apr 2017, July 2017, Nov 2017 Poster Modality switch effects emerge early and increase throughout conceptual processing: evidence from ERPs (1) Event representations in episodic and semantic memory, U. York;
(2) Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics, Radboud U.;
(3) Juniorendag, Utrecht U.;
(4) 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, London;
(5) 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver
June 2016 Talk Conceptual processing at different speeds: probing linguistic and embodied systems Synapsium, Radboud University
May 2016 Poster Norming study of modality exclusivity in Dutch, and an ongoing EEG study of linguistic and embodied conceptual processing Psycholinguistics in Flanders, University of Antwerp. Tilburg University travel scholarship
June 2015 Talk New reviews and insights on language evolution Tenth Language at the University of Essex (LangUE) Conference, University of Essex
Feb, May 2015 Talk Shallow and deep conceptual representation: an ERP design Theme Meetings, Radboud U.; Neurobiology of Language Lab meeting, MPI Psycholinguistics

Blog

Brief Clarifications, Open Questions: Commentary on Liu et al. (2018)

Liu et al. (2018) present a study that implements the conceptual modality switch (CMS) paradigm, which has been used to investigate the …
2021 research methods, psycholinguistics

Collaboration while using R Markdown

In a highly recommendable presentation available on Youtube, Michael Frank walks us through R Markdown. Below, I loosely summarise and …
2020 research methods

Stray meetings in Microsoft Teams

Unwanted, stranded meetings, overlapping with a general one in a channel, can occur when people click on the Meet (now)/📷 button, …
2020 research and teaching applications

Notes about punctuation in formal writing

When writing formal pieces, some pitfalls in the punctuation are easy to avoid once you know them. Punctuation marks such as the comma, …
2020 writing

R Markdown amidst Madison parks

This document is part of teaching materials created for the workshop ‘Open data and reproducibility v2.1: R Markdown, dashboards …
2020 programming

What's in a fluke? The problem of trust and distrust

The label ‘fluke’ may in principle be skewed by the eye of the beholder, the mind of the perceiver and the availability or …
2020 viewpoint

How to engage Research Group Leaders in sustainable software practices

Multiple authors
2020 research

Incentives for good research software practices

Multiple authors
2020 software

Event-related potentials: Why and how I used them

Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer a unique insight in the study of human cognition. Let’s look at their reason-to-be for the …
2020 event-related potentials

Data is present: workshops and datathons

This project offers free activities to learn and practise reproducible data presentation. Pablo Bernabeu organises these events in the …
2020 education, programming, R

Naive principal component analysis in R

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique used to find the core components that underlie different variables. It comes in very …
2018 statistics, R

Review of the Landscape Model of reading: composition, dynamics and application

Throughout the 1990s, two opposing theories were used to explain how people understand texts, later bridged by the Landscape Model of …
2018 psycholinguistics

At Greg, 8 am

The single dependent variable, RT, was accompanied by other variables which could be analyzed as independent variables. These included …
2017 R, statistics

Modality switch effects emerge early and increase throughout conceptual processing: evidence from ERPs

Research has extensively investigated whether conceptual processing is modality-specific—that is, whether meaning is processed to a …
2017 psycholinguistics

The case for data dashboards: first steps in R Shiny

Dashboards for data visualisation, such as R Shiny and Tableau, allow the interactive exploration of data by means of drop-down lists …
2017 R, data dashboards, open data

Modality exclusivity norms for 747 properties and concepts in Dutch: a replication of English

2016 linguistic materials

The Louisiana-Minnesota-Texas crisis across media and time: a big data exercise

Racism has long been ingrained in human societies. Ancient Greek Aristotle already claimed that non-Greeks were slaves by nature, as …
Risto Hinno and Pablo Bernabeu
2016 data mining, R, big data
Avatar

Pablo Bernabeu

Psychology PhD student and teaching assistant at Lancaster University

p.bernabeu@lancaster.ac.uk

           

Interests

  • Cognitive psychology and neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Semantic / conceptual processing
  • Statistics
  • Open science
  • Programming

After doing a research master’s, I became a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in Psychology at Lancaster University. I’m investigating how conceptual processing (i.e., understanding the meaning of words) is supported by linguistic and sensorimotor brain systems. I use methods such as behavioural and electroencephalographic experiments, corpus analysis, statistics and programming. My CV is available.

The linguistic and sensorimotor bases of semantic processing: an investigation into the role of individual differences

Conceptual processing has been found to draw on two cognitive systems. One is a linguistic system, which is based on knowledge of words and the relations among them. The other is a sensorimotor system, which draws on our perceptual, motor and affective experience. These two systems contribute to conceptual processing in a sequential manner: the linguistic system is activated first, providing more superficial semantic information, with the sensorimotor system slower to reach peak activation, but providing more refined meaning. We know that the relative importance of each system is modulated by contextual factors (e.g., linguistic context, processing goals, cognitive resources). However, we know much less about how people’s individual cognitive capacities and experience (reading experience, reasoning ability) interact with these systems, which has become a central theme in my work.

Much evidence has been found in cognitive psychology for the role of linguistic systems (based on statistical regularities in how words co-occur in language) and sensorimotor systems (based on perceptual, motor, affective experience). The linguistic system is consistently linked to faster, more superficial processing, while the sensorimotor system is linked to slower, more cognitively demanding tasks (Connell & Lynott, 2013; Louwerse et al., 2015). Recent evidence suggests that individual differences, such as measures of reading experience (e.g., Pexman & Yap, 2018) and of sensorimotor experience (Beilock, et al., 2008; Vukovic & Williams, 2015), provide additional explanatory power for accounts of embodied cognition. For example, linguistic individual differences in vocabulary predict word recognition and information processing speed (Yap et al., 2012). Likewise, sensorimotor individual differences in spatial perspective-taking are also implicated in semantic processing, as participants who tend to naturally adopt an internal perspective in space are more likely to engage in perceptual simulation when reading, by identifying themselves as the protagonist (Vukovic & Williams, 2015).

Degrees

  • PhD Psychology with graduate teaching scholarship, 2022 (expected)

    Lancaster University (United Kingdom)

    -  Service: peer-review for Cognitive Science journal, Psychological Science Accelerator; internship facilitation; contribution to departmental ‘Prospr’ website.

    -  Activities

  • Research Master Language and Communication, 2017

    Tilburg University and Radboud University (Netherlands)

    -  Student member, Master’s curriculum and accreditation committee

    -  Tilburg U. Scholarship for Academic Excellence, 2014/2015

    -  Grade: 7.54 out of 10 (Distinction)

  • BA English Philology, 2013

    Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain)

    -  One-year Erasmus exchange at University of Jyväskylä, Finland

    -  One-year exchange at University of Barcelona, Spain

    -  Six-month teaching placement in Kaunas, Lithuania

    -  Grade: 7.30 out of 10 (2:1 Hons)

Further courses

Teaching

As a graduate teaching assistant, I devote 180 hours a year to leading 30 seminars and marking 80 essays in developmental, cognitive and social psychology, as well as helping in 30 statistics labs. I was also a representative for graduate teaching assistants in the department for a year.

Course and remit
2020–21 Introduction to developmental psychology (115) — Seminars and essay marking
Introduction to neuroscience (112)— Seminars
Introduction to cognitive psychology (111) — Seminars and essay marking
Social psychology in the digital age (113) — Seminars
Statistics for psychologists I and II (121 and 122) using R — Labs
2019–20 Understanding psychology (101) — Seminars and essay marking
Cognitive psychology (201) — Seminars and essay marking
Master’s statistics (401) using R — Labs
2018–19 Understanding psychology (101) — Seminars and essay marking
Investigating psychology: Analysis (102) using SPSS — Labs

Besides this experience, I have a Carpentries Instructor certificate, I have run several workshops and presentations, and earlier I taught English to secondary-education students, and Spanish to adults.

Skills
Cognitive science Electroencephalography, event-related potentials, Brain Vision (e.g., ), transcranial brain stimulation, eye tracking, internet-based experiments, jsPsych, basic E-Prime and Presentation
Statistics Mainly frequentist and some Bayesian statistics. Linear mixed-effects models, ANOVA, regression, t-test, chi-squared, correlation, principal component analysis, power analysis, equivalence testing (e.g., )
R programming R Markdown; online data dashboards with Shiny, Flexdashboard, Plotly; Binder environments (e.g., ); mining, preprocessing, analysis of Big Data (language corpora, news and social media, through API or web scraping); statistics; visualisation; Natural Language Processing (regular expressions, word frequency and sentiment analysis, topic modelling; e.g., ); Tidyverse (e.g., )
Data management and web development Git version control, High-Performance Computing, Bash (command line), Binder environments, HTML, CSS (e.g., )
Business and administration Quantitative and qualitative service analysis. Power BI, Zendesk, Jira, Confluence, Asana
Languages English: C1. IELTS 2018 (out of 9): Writing, 7.5; Reading, 7.5; Speaking, 7.5; Listening, 8.5. Spanish: native. Catalan: B1. French: B1. Dutch: A2. Italian: A2

Other funding
2021 Joint runner-up in the Open Scholarhip Prize Competition 2021, organised by Open Scholarship Community Galway Prize awarded after a final series of presentations, and used in PhD research.
2020 RepliCATS Grant, University of Melbourne Awarded for completing 20 RepliCATS research assessments, and used in PhD research.
2020 Gorilla Grant from Gorilla and Prolific Conducting a large-sample experiment on the internet.
2020–2021 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Organising training and practice activities in research software. I focussed on data presentation using R.
2017 Psychonomic Society Graduate Travel Award for 58th Annual Meeting Presenting a poster on research from my master’s.
2017 Experimental Psychology Society Grindley Grant Presenting a poster on research from my master’s at conference ‘Event representations in episodic and semantic memory’.
2017 Experimental Psychology Society Grindley Grant Presenting a poster on research from my master’s at Cognitive Science Society Conference.
2017 Student Volunteer, Cognitive Science Society Conference Presenting a poster on research from my master’s.
2016 Funding for experiment from Neurobiology of Language Dept., Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics Conducting an EEG experiment for my master’s thesis.

Other work
May – July 2018 Service analyst. Onfido, London, UK
Dec 2015 – Feb 2016 Part-time Data Science market research and student recruitment. Tilburg U.
2015 – 2016 Student representative at master’s fairs in Spain. Radboud U., Tilburg U.
2013 – 2016 Presenter of my master’s programme at open days. Tilburg U.
2013 – 2016 Communications and student recruitment. Academia Bravosol, Madrid, Spain

Videos

2021 ·  Linguistic and embodied systems in conceptual processing: Variation across individuals and items (see video)

2021 ·  Towards reproducibility and maximally-open data (see video)

2020 ·  Reproducibilidad en torno a una aplicación web (ver más)

2020 ·  Workshop on R Markdown, dashboards and Binder (see programme and materials)

2020 ·  Personal profile and experience at Lancaster U. Psychology Dept.

2020 ·  Embedding open research and reproducibility in the UG and PGT curricula

2019 ·  Part of application for Gorilla Grant

2019 ·  Part of application for Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship

2019 ·  Demonstration of procedure for PSA experiments (see video)

Common topics

cognition conceptual modality switch conceptual processing conceptual replication CSS event-related potentials Flexdashboard HTML language comprehension linear mixed-effects models linguistics modality exclusivity norms open data psycholinguistics R R Shiny reading Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship statistics web application

Contact

p.bernabeu@lancaster.ac.uk