Filing words away makes room for more

Polymeric Gas Separation Membranes: What Makes them Industrially more Attractive?

What makes words sound similar?

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo...

What makes words special? Words as unmotivated cues.

Verbal labels, such as the words "dog" and "guitar," activate conceptual knowledge more effectively than corresponding environmental sounds, such as a dog bark or a guitar strum, even though both are unambiguous cues to the categories of dogs and guitars (Lupyan & Thompson-Schill, 2012). We hypothesize that this advantage of labels emerges because word-forms, unlike other cues, do not vary in a...

Moonlight Makes Owls More Chatty

BACKGROUND Lunar cycles seem to affect many of the rhythms, temporal patterns and behaviors of living things on Earth. Ambient light is known to affect visual communication in animals, with the conspicuousness of visual signals being largely determined by the light available for reflection by the sender. Although most previous studies in this context have focused on diurnal light, moonlight sho...

What Makes Annuitization More Appealing?

We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision. Very few respondents choose declining real payout streams over flat or increasing real payout streams of equivalent expected present value. Hi...