“Noun phrase number is a privileged source of information as to the semantic structure of predicates.” So concludes a recent article by Lidz, Gleitman, and Gleitman (2003: 169), which purports to demonstrate the viability of a “universalist” mapping between syntax and semantics as opposed to an “emergentist” view of the mapping, attributed to Goldberg (1999) and Tomasello (2000). Lidz et al. (2...

To the Editor — In relation to the use of radar backscatter to estimate forest biomass, Woodhouse et al.1 state that our study2 provides an extreme example of a common analytical error, namely fitting a log function instead of a sigmoidal function. In fact, there is almost no difference between these functions, because the slope of the log function is very small in higher biomass ranges. Furthe...

Mungbam [mij] is an endangered and underdocumented Bantoid (Yemne-Kimbi) language of the Northwest province of Cameroon with approximatly 2000 speakers divided between five dialects (Munken, Ngun, Biya, Abar and Missong) (Good et al., in press). The goal of this presentation is to draw attention to prominence asymmetries in Mungbam words which indicate that the first syllable of noun and verb s...

One needs to determine rst what is a natural preferred analysis. On the one hand, a selective ranking of alternatives seems to be the correct choice. Observationally, we remark that people impose rather strong restrictions on the preferred analyses they assign to an ambiguous sentence, which is often not even perceived as ambiguous. In some cases, speakers do not realize that a sentence is ambi...

This paper presents the mask method (MASK), a new population-based, evolutionary search procedure for nd-ing models for satissability problems (SAT). In this method, a partial truth assignment for a given boolean expression containing N variables is represented by a partially instantiated 0/1 string with N positions (called mask), with each position coding one variable. The mask method begins w...

Coordinations in noun phrases often pose the problem that elliptified parts have to be reconstructed for proper semantic interpretation. Unfortunately, the detection of coordinated heads and identification of elliptified elements notoriously lead to ambiguous reconstruction alternatives. While linguistic intuition suggests that semantic criteria might play an important, if not superior, role in...

Using eye-tracking, two studies investigated whether a dynamic vs. static emotional facial expression can influence how a listener interprets a subsequent emotionally-valenced utterance in relation to a visual context. Crucially, we assessed whether such facial priming changes with the comprehender’s age (younger vs. older adults). Participants inspected a static (Experiment 1, Carminati & Knoe...