Comprehension of wh-questions often poses challenges for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in wh-movement languages like English. However, it remains unclear whether wh-in situ languages like Mandarin present similar difficulties. Moreover, the present study explores potential differences in comprehension between Mandarin subject and object wh-questions. We hypothesize a subject wh-question advantage, given that Mandarin object wh-questions exhibit a longer dependency than subject wh-questions. If confirmed, it would support that Mandarin wh-questions involve covert movement. Using eye-movement measures of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm, this study investigates the comprehension of matrix subject and object wh-questions in Mandarin-speaking children with ASD (N = 35, mean age = 60.94 months) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers (N = 38, mean age = 29.66 months), matched on expressive vocabulary levels. The results showed that children in the TD group comprehended both subject and object wh-questions. However, in the ASD group, children comprehended only subject wh-questions. Overall, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD exhibited weaker comprehension of wh-questions than their TD counterparts, with particular difficulty processing object wh-questions. The subject-over-object advantage in wh-questions among Mandarin-speaking children with ASD suggests that they were sensitive to the longer dependency involved in object wh-questions. These findings support the involvement of covert movement in Mandarin wh-questions.

This paper compares the acoustic properties of lateral consonants in two syllable positions in four languages – Russian, English, Romanian, and Georgian – each one representative of a distinct allophonic pattern. This study is also the first production study of Georgian lateral allophony including data from multiple speakers. By relying on both static formant measurements and dynamic analyses of formant trajectories, the study provides deeper insights into the role of syllable position and of vowel context in shaping lateral variation cross-linguistically. The results highlight differences in the production of laterals in two ways: they capture the gradience of the ‘dark’/‘light’ lateral variation across the four languages, and they contribute to our understanding of how intrinsic and extrinsic factors interact in lateral consonant production. The findings contribute to the growing body of research on lateral allophony. They underscore the importance of integrating dynamic methods, and of including less well studied languages.

The transnational cleavage captures a divide between those with cosmopolitan orientations who are more positive about international migration, trade, and governance and those with more nationalist outlooks. Recent research has demonstrated that polarisation along this cleavage in Europe is increasingly linked to urban-rural differences: people living in urban areas tend to be more cosmopolitan than people in rural areas, but existing studies have not yet elaborately analysed differences in voting behaviour. Moreover, education is the most consistent predictor of attitudes related to the transnational cleavage, and higher-educated individuals more often live in cities. Urban-rural political differences may therefore reflect differences in educational attainment between urban and rural inhabitants. We take a longitudinal perspective to assess the degree of overlap between urban-rural and educational differences in voting for parties at the opposite ends of the transnational cleavage (‘GAL’ and ‘TAN’ parties), using data from all 11 rounds of the European Social Survey (2002–2024). We find that urban voters are overrepresented in the electorates of GAL parties and underrepresented in the electorates of TAN parties. These urban-rural differences are growing over time and, only for a small portion, overlap with educational divides in GAL/TAN voting. Although, overall, educational attainment remains more strongly related to GAL/TAN voting, both educational attainment and urban-rural residence have their own explanatory value. These findings underscore that ‘place’ increasingly matters in structuring political conflict across Europe and highlight the importance of further incorporating geography into future research on the transnational cleavage.

A sparse high-gain multifaceted circularly polarized antenna array based on partially reflecting surfaces (PRSs) is designed. Circular polarization is obtained by implementing the sequential phase rotation method at the source antenna level. Beamforming is implemented using phase compensation combined with amplitude weighting proportional to the radiated intensity of the given facet in the targeted direction, following the maximum ratio transmission concept. The radiation pattern is scanned across the angular region specified by the angular gap between adjacent facets. The obtained beamformed result shows a maximum gain fluctuation smaller than 0.5 dB across the scanned sector, together with a sidelobe suppression of 10.27 dB, and the obtained embedded element pattern exhibits a flat top.

In technology-enhanced language learning (TELL), self-regulated language learning (SRLL) strategies are essential for supporting English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing development. As collaborative learning becomes increasingly prominent in TELL, SRLL has expanded from individual regulation to collaborative contexts. However, limited research has compared how individual and collaborative SRLL contexts influence learners’ strategy use, writing performance, and learning behaviors. To address this gap, this study used WeChat as a mobile learning platform to compare university-level EFL learners’ SRLL strategy use, writing performance, and behavioral patterns in individual and collaborative self-regulated writing programs. Two intact classes were assigned to either a WeChat-based individual group (WIG) or a WeChat-based collaborative group (WCG). The collected data included SRLL strategy use questionnaire, writing scores, and WeChat learning logs. Results showed that the collaborative context promoted learners’ overall, cognitive, metacognitive, and behavioral SRLL strategy use, although no significant difference was found in motivational strategy use. The WCG also achieved higher writing performance and showed distinctive regulatory behaviors related to time monitoring and feedback awareness. These findings suggest that SRLL is a dynamic and cyclical process shaped by task demands, technological affordances, and social interaction. They also highlight the value of integrating individual and collaborative learning modes to support learners’ movement between self-regulation, co-regulation, and socially shared regulation.

The Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) survey, which capitalises on the MWA’s large field of view and voltage recording capability, is an ambitious effort to conduct sensitive searches for pulsars and fast transients in the 140–170MHz band. The novelty of voltage recording, long dwell times (4800 s) and the high-time and -frequency resolutions (100 μs/10-kHz) exchange a large survey speed (∼ 450 deg2 h–1) for high computational cost. The survey covers the entire sky south of +30° in declination through a series of dedicated observing campaigns, accumulating nearly four petabytes of data. The large volumes of data and the processing challenges at low frequencies necessitate data processing to be approached in multiple phases, and the initial searches focused on a first-pass (shallow) survey of parts of the skies, as reported in earlier papers in this series. These data are also processed for re-detections of hundreds of known pulsars in the southern sky, many of which are also the first detections at frequencies below 400 MHz. This paper is motivated by the need to address the inherent difficulties (for the wider community) in handling large amounts of voltage data and software/processing challenges for routine pulsar detections, and also by the fast-evolving landscape of the SKA Observatory (SKAO).With the construction and commissioning ramping up towards the full-scale SKA-Low, a low-frequency catalogue of detectable pulsars in the southern sky will prove to be a valuable reference for the science verification exercise. A growing sample of low-frequency pulsar detections and measurements will also prove invaluable in a variety of science applications including population studies, survey simulations and emission beam models, refining interstellar medium models for electron densities and the spatial distribution of turbulence, and also for forecasting the detection prospects and survey yield from pulsar surveys planned with SKA-Low. We also present an electronic catalogue of various data products, including pulse profiles, time series and multi-channel folded archives, along with the measurements of dispersion and rotation measures, and mean flux densities for the detected pulsars, and this will be periodically updated as more detections flow on from the ongoing data processing.

This article follows the bicycle journeys of Fanny Bullock and William Hunter Workman as they cycled through the imperial spaces of Algeria, Sri Lanka, and India between 1894 and 1899. It thinks through how a new technology of personal mobility shaped the Workmans’ experience of the world and seeks to better understand the ways the forces of empire both produced and influenced their outlooks. In these spaces of European empire, Fanny Bullock Workman crafted a sense of New Womanhood rooted in the politics of gendered ability and racial superiority that was given intense meaning by a technology socialized as a way to gain authentic experiences of both the past and present. By looking at the ways people moved through overlapping imperial modalities, this article argues, historians can better access the American experience of the world at a granular level.

This paper focuses on Meiji Japan's annexation of the Ryukyus as seen through the eyes of key Western diplomats in the 1870s. Although it played out over seven years, the annexation process unfolded relatively smoothly on the international stage. One reason for this was the skill with which Japanese diplomats handled inquiries and potential protests by Western diplomats. In this article, I show that, as early as 1872, leading members of the Meiji government were gaining familiarity with the nuances of Western diplomatic maneuvering. Indeed, in some ways the annexation functioned as a rehearsal for future diplomatic challenges the regime would face. In retrospect, it offers an excellent lens through which to view Japanese diplomacy of the 1870s.

We identify a novel pathway that links financial globalization to politics. We emphasize the effect of globalization on the relationship between governments and domestic business owners, who, like all borrowers, are subject to “Global Credit Cycles” originating from the U.S. Downturns in these cycles, stemming from high U.S. interest rates, reduce credit availability, depress asset prices, and broadly worsen the outlook for private sector profits. While politicians have limited power to address the underlying financial conditions, they can adopt business-friendly politics to signal their willingness to compensate firms for the higher borrowing costs driven by higher U.S. interest rates. We support our argument with evidence from party manifestos across 59 countries, covering 1963 to 2017. Our paper documents a new connection between global credit cycles and party positions during an era of largely unrestricted capital mobility.

Biodesign education increasingly engages with living and bio-based materials whose temporal, relational, and ecological properties challenge established modes of material archiving and teaching. Conventional material libraries, oriented toward stabilisation and preservation, are poorly equipped to address growth, contamination, and decay as constitutive material processes. This paper proposes a reconceptualisation of material libraries as living material archives: dynamic epistemic infrastructures that foreground transformation, care, and finitude rather than control. Drawing on feminist technoscience and material culture studies, the paper develops three conceptual lenses – cross-contamination, sympoiesis, and the website as garden – to examine how material and digital archives can support situated knowledge production in biodesign education. These perspectives are grounded in a detailed case study of the Living Library, a hybrid analogue–digital teaching project developed at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. The paper demonstrates how temporary, process-oriented archives can operationalise ecological responsibility, disciplinary openness, and regenerative learning practices.

Mechanical cultivation can utilize more than one type of weed control implement in the same pass. Implements may even be synergistically “stacked” to maximize efficacy. However, in previous trials, stacked setups caused unacceptable damage to crops. In this study, several changes to previously used cultivation setups were made, including adding global positioning system guidance, using sweeps rather than torsion weeders, and spacing the implements farther from the crop. In test crops of snap beans and beets, stacked three-tool combinations resulted in greater weed-control efficacy with no significant decrease in the survival of well-established crops – thereby providing improved selectivity. Within one-, two-, or three-tool categories, there were few differences, except that the harrow-type implements were often less aggressive than the other tools. Combining all our trials, the crop-to-weed height ratio appeared to be a main driver of intrarow cultivation success, but stacking still provided a benefit. Specifically, to achieve successful cultivation with 80% weed control and 5% or less crop mortality, we modeled that one, two, and three tool combinations required crop-to-weed height ratios of at least 6.2, 5.6, and 3.6, respectively. Based on these trials, farmers may improve their cultivation selectivity by creating conditions in which their crops are as large as possible relative to weeds and by using precisely guided, stacked cultivation implements adjusted to minimize contact with crops.

Time-varying coefficient modeling (TVCM), which represents regression coefficients as smooth functions of continuous time, provides a flexible framework for uncovering complex patterns of change in levels and associations in intensive longitudinal data. However, conventional TVCM remains limited to investigating directional effects across individuals. By introducing a TVCM formulation of the multivariate normal distribution, the present study extends TVCM to explore change in undirected associations (couplings) and variability, thereby broadening its utility for psychological research. We discuss three versions of this approach: an aggregate-level model and two hierarchical versions capturing interindividual differences in unfolding change, either via person-specific intercepts accounting for onset differences or through fully person-specific coefficient functions smoothed via partial pooling. To illustrate the proposed developments, we apply them to six weeks of intensive longitudinal data from 16 anxiety patients undergoing therapy and examine unfolding changes in the level and volatility of nervousness and threat monitoring, their coupling, as well as between-person heterogeneity in each of these. We further show how inspecting first-order derivatives of the coefficient functions supports identifying periods of stability and change. Finally, we discuss extensions incorporating person-level characteristics to explain heterogeneity in patterns of change and predict outcomes.