Supporting research on social semantic deficits: A psycholinguistic database for Spanish-speaking populations and socialness-related variance in lexical performance

Behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and other socio-affective disorders are associated with deficits in processing social concepts (units denoting interpersonal traits, events, and circumstances). This pattern contributes to diagnosis and the prediction of specific neural alterations. However, social concepts lack normative datasets for underrepresented languages, hindering the strategic selection of stimuli for research in disadvantaged populations. To tackle this gap, we created a normative psycholinguistic database of social and non-social concepts for Spanish-speaking Latinos. Healthy adults rated 600 Spanish words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) for social relevance online. Subsets of 100 high- and low-sociality words (e.g., “friendship” and “button” respectively) were randomly presented and rated on a Likert scale (1 = no sociality, 7 = high sociality). Socialness ratings averaged 5.76 (SD=0.56) for social words and 1.69 (SD=0.62) for non-social words, with consistent bimodal patterns across grammatical categories. Preliminary lexical-task results suggest that social content influences reaction times and accuracy. These data show a clear distinction between social and non-social categories, and the resulting database provides a valuable resource for data collection in underrepresented populations, contributing a Latin American perspective to research on brain dysfunction.