Groups with commuting inner mappings are of nilpotency class at most two, but there exist loops with commuting inner mappings and of nilpotency class higher than two, called loops of Csörgő type. In order to obtain small loops of Csörgő type, we expand our programme from Explicit constructions of loops with commuting inner mappings, European J. Combin. 29 (2008), 1662–1681, and analyze the foll...

Traffic signs are effective only when users clearly understand their meaning. This paper reviews recent studies concerning traffic sign comprehension and finds that unsatisfactory comprehension is a common problem for drivers in many countries. The influence of user characteristics and sign cognitive features on understanding levels are summarized and discussed. While the positive relation betw...

This paper measures the technological significance of voluntary standard setting organizations (SSOs) by examining citations to patents disclosed in the standard setting process. We find that SSO patents are cited far more frequently than a set of control patents, and that SSO patents receive citations for a much longer period of time. Furthermore, we find a significant correlation between cita...

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our ana...

Article history: Received 1 August 2007 Received in revised form 22 May 2009 Accepted 26 May 2009

Complexity has been linked to ease of learning. This article explores the roles of two measures of complexity – feature economy and logical complexity – in the acquisition of sets of signs, taken from a small sign language that serves as an analogue of plosive inventories in spoken language. In a learning experiment, participants acquired data sets that varied in feature economy and logical com...

Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of infle...