Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed. Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension. These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children’s irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

This article explicates the border as a metaphor for an English Canadian nation and for Canadian philosophy in English Canada. The concept of the nation is explicated with reference to Winthrop Pickford Bell. The role of metaphor in philosophy is justified while maintaining its distinction from literature or poetry. Key features of the concept of “border” are division, distinction, and relation. The fact that the border is open to two different interpretations testifies to its viability. Use of the border as a metaphor in philosophy and related cultural expressions suggests that it has a limited, though persisting, duration.

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

The ‘culturomics’ and other big data approaches have been widely used to trace the development of human cognition and social change. In this cross-lingual study, we examine historical changes in the frequency of discourse connectives (DCs) in Chinese, English, French, German and Spanish over the last two centuries. Our analyses reveal a robust and long-term decline in the frequency of most DCs in English, French, German and Spanish between 1800 and 2000. These diachronic trends closely parallel changes in other stylistic indicators, pointing to coherent shifts in language use and register evolution. Although our findings align with previous studies and recent observations of changing patterns in linguistic rationality, they should not be interpreted as evidence of declining human capacities for logic or rational reasoning. Instead, the observed patterns reflect a broad and sustained process of ‘colloquialization’ in written language, driven by socio-cultural transformations and evolving communicative norms. This study advances our understanding of historical language change and its underlying mechanisms, offering insights into the coevolution of language, cognition and society.

Radiocarbon dating is essential for establishing robust chronologies in archaeological and paleoenvironmental contexts spanning the last 55,000 years. Pottery, pervasive in the archaeological record, offers a crucial framework for dating human activity during the Holocene. Traditionally, radiocarbon dating of pottery has relied on targeting carbonaceous inclusions such as organic temper or measuring stratigraphically associated materials like bone and charcoal. Inaccuracies can arise, however, if the targeted fraction does not reflect the timing of vessel use or if stratigraphic associations are uncertain. An alternative involves radiocarbon dating of lipid residues, particularly fatty acids absorbed into the ceramic matrix during the processing and storage of plant and animal-derived resources. This approach holds promise for delivering highly accurate measurements directly correlating to vessel use. At the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, efforts have been made to develop this methodology through compound-specific radiocarbon dating of pottery, employing a gas chromatography (GC)-preparative fraction collector (PFC) approach. Here, we describe the protocol and present preliminary findings, including analyses conducted on pottery samples sourced from an archaeological site with an established chronology.

Archaeological sampling is a critical yet inconsistently applied aspect of field methodology. Poorly designed strategies produce biased or irreproducible results, especially when recovery is labor-intensive and research expectations are high. This article addresses that challenge through the lens of spatial microrefuse analysis, using simulation modeling to evaluate current practices and improve sampling design, training, and planning. A review of 27 published microrefuse studies reveals wide variation in sampling strategies, unit sizes, and volumes, with little evidence of statistical justification. To explore the consequences of this variation, I introduce the Archaeological Sampling Experiment Laboratory (tASEL), an open-source simulation tool developed in NetLogo and archived in the CoMSES model library. tASEL allows archaeologists to construct artifact distributions and test random, systematic, or hybrid sampling frames with immediate visual and statistical feedback. I used tASEL to conduct 22,000 virtual sampling experiments across two artifact distributions: a diffuse random scatter and a highly clustered pattern. Results show that sampling performance varies significantly by distribution, sample size, and frame design. Random strategies produced the highest accuracy and lowest bias. I conclude by demonstrating how tASEL can be used in classroom and field contexts to improve sampling literacy and support more robust archaeological practice.

This study investigates the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on children’s vocabulary, focusing on the distinction between vocabulary breadth (number of words known) and vocabulary depth (quality of word knowledge). It aims to determine whether SES affects both dimensions equally and whether the relationship between SES and vocabulary depth is mediated by vocabulary breadth. Participants were 219 children schooled in France in fourth and fifth grades who had French as their dominant language. Analyses showed that SES significantly influences vocabulary breadth, as predicted by previous research. Importantly, it also impacts vocabulary depth. Mediation analysis revealed that vocabulary breadth can mediate this effect depending on the task used to measure vocabulary depth.

We study the asymptotic properties, in the weak sense, of regenerative processes and Markov renewal processes. For the latter, we derive both renewal-type results, also concerning the related counting process, and ergodic-type results, including the so-called $\varphi$-mixing property. This theoretical framework permits us to study the weak limit of the integral of a semi-Markov process, which can be interpreted as the position of a particle moving with finite velocities, taken for a random time according to the Markov renewal process underlying the semi-Markov one. Under mild conditions, we obtain the weak convergence to scaled Brownian motion. As a particular case, this result establishes the weak convergence of the classical generalized telegraph process.

This paper adopts a sociosemiotic perspective to examine how normative consensus and legitimacy are constructed in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance discourse. Drawing on a corpus of forty-seven international normative documents, the study identifies an emerging cross-textual consensus around three core principles – Safety, Human-centric and Fairness – and analyses how these are semiotically encoded. The findings reveal tensions between state and non-state actors, and between semiotic agreement and practical implementation. For instance, ‘Safety’ is often framed through securitisation discourse, while ‘Human-centric’ is increasingly grounded in international human rights frameworks. The study further shows that discursive strategies such as nominalisation help establish surface-level consensus but introduce ambiguity that undermines enforceability. By conceptualising governance texts as dynamic semiotic systems, this research moves beyond the hard law–soft law dichotomy, revealing global AI regulation as a contested arena of meaning-making. It offers a theoretical basis for advancing more inclusive and operational governance models.

The shared-syntax argument of bilingual language representations has support from studies of cross-linguistic structural priming. However, more research needs to be conducted to support the grammatical co-activation hypothesis. The current study investigates the behavioral patterns of bilingual grammatical co-activation in comprehension, taking into account the age of immersion (AoI), which significantly affects the performance of bilinguals. Specifically, we tested 114 native speakers of English: 84 English–French bilinguals (53 early and 31 late learners of French) and 30 functional English monolinguals with a grammatical maze task using English stimuli manipulated with the two opposing English and French rules of adverb placement. Early bilinguals with an AoI earlier than 7 appear to be more accepting of the French adverb placement while reading English sentences. This suggests that earlier bilinguals are more likely to show co-activation (and competition) of the two languages. Results support the shared-syntax system of bilingual grammatical representations.

Our research set out to determine how the distinctive social ethos and tactile appeal of physical modular synthesisers could be transferred into extended reality contexts. Employing a ‘netnographic’ approach, the research examined content drawn from social media platforms including YouTube, Discord and Reddit. Particular attention was given to an analysis of ‘PatchWorld’ as the most prominent commercially available virtual modular synthesis tool. Additionally, ‘OpenSoundLab’, an open-source mixed-reality modular sound laboratory that was developed in earlier research, was adapted to allow multi-user sessions in mixed reality (MR), both locally co-located or remotely. Commercial standalone headsets were handed out to three artists in order to observe how they translate their patch and performance practices into extended realities. Distributing both the headsets and software functioned as a form of ‘cultural probe’, enabling the collection of detailed user experiences and acting as a prompt for informed conversations. Through this process, the evaluation yielded evidence that some of the most valued aspects of using physical modular systems can be translated to virtual modular systems, especially since these share a similar – if not greater – potential for creative and social immersion in a spatial instrument.

We analyzed the determinants and potential of U.S. agricultural exports to South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Southern African countries by employing a stochastic frontier gravity model. Our estimated results suggest that importers’ GDP, institutional quality, globalization level, and participation in Trade and Investment Framework Agreement significantly promote U.S. exports, while geographic distance and landlocked status act as major constraints. The derived technical efficiency scores reveal considerable underperformance of U.S. exports. We recommend that the United States can expand and strengthen its Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, institutional cooperation, interconnectedness, and direct policy focus toward countries with the largest export gaps.