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As a human-specific trait, language offers a unique window on human cognition. Grammatical constraints on the ways we speak about events, for instance, have long been thought to reveal the representational formats that our minds impose on the ways that we think about events. In recent research, verbs that name events of death have stood out as key counterexamples to standard theories of the grammatical constraints on possible verbs. The special status of these thanatological verbs raises two important questions: why, given the vast number of verbs in any language, is it that verbs of death hold this special status, and what do they tell us about the restrictions on the representational format for possible verbs? This paper reexamines the evidence coming from verbs of death, confirming that they are counterexamples to standard theories, but that their behaviour suggests a more revealing constraint on our mental representations-that our minds impose strict restrictions on the format of asserted meaning. Thus, the constraints on linguistic representation and the human mind offer a unique perspective on the mental representations of thanatological phenomena.This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals'., (© 2018 The Author(s).)

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment ('cloze'). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories ( N =334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words., Competing Interests: MN, SP, EH, KS, ED, NK, SV, FB, VK, AI, DM, DB, GR, HF, SB, XF, JT, EK, EH, DD, ZK, SR, FH No competing interests declared, (© 2018, Nieuwland et al.)

It has been well established that subject-verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.