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In addition to referential uses, pronouns can have covarying interpretations, i.e., exhibit the behavior of a bound variable. The grammatical mechanism(s) behind such readings have been subject to longstanding debates: Some authors argue for a fairly flexible but unified semantic mechanism that is not tied closely to syntactic configurations. Others distinguish a core class of bona fidebinding with tight syntactic constraints from other mechanisms that give rise to ultimately parallel effects, but do so more indirectly. Psycholinguistic work has started to uncover the processing mechanisms involved in evaluating dependencies between covarying pronouns and (candidate) antecedents. Moulton and Han (2018) leverage the processing perspective to try to shed light on the theoretical question of what grammatical mechanism is at play for a given covarying pronoun. They argue that so-called Gender Mismatch Effects only arise for cases of bona fide binding, supporting the existence of distinct grammatical mechanisms. However, Kush and Eik (2019), looking at another construction involving the relevant other covariation mechanisms, do find Gender Mismatch Effects. These authors suggest that various contextual factors can make a covarying interpretation harder to obtain, and they propose adjustments to Moulton and Han’s stimuli that they think should lead to fast Gender Mismatch Effects even when no bona fide binding is involved. A series of self-paced reading experiments replicate the results from Moulton and Han, and then extend the paradigm to variations along the lines suggested by Kush and Eik. The adjustment of contextual factors indeed results in Gender Mismatch Effects for both environments. We discuss how the processing evidence informs the theoretical issues.

Estimates of the permafrost-climate feedback vary in magnitude and sign, partly because permafrost carbon stability in warmer-than-present conditions is not well constrained. Here we use a Plio-Pleistocene lacustrine reconstruction of mean annual air temperature (MAAT) from the Tibetan Plateau, the largest alpine permafrost region on the Earth, to constrain past and future changes in permafrost carbon storage. Clumped isotope-temperatures (Δ47-T) indicate warmer MAAT (~1.2 °C) prior to 2.7 Ma, and support a permafrost-free environment on the northern Tibetan Plateau in a warmer-than-present climate. Δ47-T indicate ~8.1 °C cooling from 2.7 Ma, coincident with Northern Hemisphere glacial intensification. Combined with climate models and global permafrost distribution, these results indicate, under conditions similar to mid-Pliocene Warm period (3.3-3.0 Ma), ~60% of alpine permafrost containing ~85 petagrams of carbon may be vulnerable to thawing compared to ~20% of circumarctic permafrost. This estimate highlights ~25% of permafrost carbon and the permafrost-climate feedback could originate in alpine areas.

We explore the impact of speaker identity on the interpretationof number words in a T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment) task –a paradigm in which respondents assess whether a givendescription appropriately represents a given body of facts. Wefind that imprecise statements from speakers socially expectedto be less precise – i.e. “Chill” ones – are rejected at a higherrate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, thanthose from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely– i.e. “Nerdy” ones, and especially so when participants donot identify with the speaker’s properties. This shows that TVJassessments are impacted by respondents’ social perception ofthe speaker; but that they are affected by social considerationsin a different way from other experimental tasks similarlytapping into meaning interpretation, suggesting a nuancedinterplay between social information and pragmatic reasoning

PCIbex is a free web platform for designing and running a wide variety of behavioral experiments online. It provides a simple and accessible, yet versatile code interface for designing experimental tasks, and furthermore makes it possible to share experiment code and resources with a single click, allowing for easy replication. PCIbex comes with an easy-to-learn mini-language, which builds on a standard JavaScript engine. Advanced features include audio- and video-recording as well as an integration of the webgazer eye-tracking API. The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the basic functionalities, as well as illustrations of advanced features and time for Q&A. While already in fairly wide use in the linguistics community, the tutorial aims to make this resource more widely accessible within the cognitive science community at large.

Using “A” in noun phrases such as “A father of the vic-tim” is odd, which is commonly explained by the princi-ple Maximize Presupposition, requiring speakers to usethe alternative with the strongest presupposition (here“The”, given its uniqueness presupposition). This re-sults in an anti-uniqueness inference for “A” (clashingwith stereotypical expectations here), sometimes labelledas an ‘anti-presupposition’ (Percus, 2006), as it derivesfrom reasoning over the presuppositions of alternativeforms. We compare these inferences to the uniquenessinferences associated with definites, while manipulatinguniqueness expectations in a picture manipulation taskusing visual world eye-tracking. This offers a minimalcomparison of uniqueness-based inferences that are lexi-cally encoded vs. pragmatically inferred, and furthermoretests the prediction that the accommodatability of the def-inite’s presupposition plays a role in the derivation of anti-uniqueness inferences (Rouillard & Schwarz, 2017).

Formaldehyde is a platform chemical used for example in the syntheses of polymers and complex molecules. The current formaldehyde synthesis relies on high temperatures to produce an aqueous solution, which requires energy intensive water removal for its use as a C1 building block. In this work, we report the successful electrification of the direct synthesis of anhydrous formaldehyde from methanol. Sustainable formaldehyde is produced with Faraday efficiencies of 80% in an H-cell and even up to 90% and elevated current densities in a scaled-up flow reactor. Comparing different reaction conditions, we furthermore show an impact of the current density and electrolyte concentration on the prevalent reaction mechanism. Our study demonstrates a selective and efficient electrochemical synthesis of dry formaldehyde at relevant scales, paving the way for green industrial production processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]