Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

The sparse stellar ensemble NGC 6994 = M73 has recently been discussed as a possible remnant of an old open cluster. In order to solve the controversy on the nature of this object we have taken high-resolution spectra of the six brightest stars within 6′ angular distance of its nominal position. These stars are the only obvious member candidates for an eventual cluster or cluster remnant since ...