The production of meltwater from glacier ice, which is exposed at the margins of land ice during the summer, is responsible for a large proportion of glacier mass loss. The rate of meltwater production from glacier ice is especially sensitive to its physical structure and chemical composition which combine to determine the albedo of glacier ice. However, the optical properties of near-surface glacier ice are not well known since most prior work has focused on laboratory-grown ice or deep cores. Here, we demonstrate a measurement technique based on diffuse propagation of nanosecond-duration laser pulses in near-surface glacier ice that enables the independent measurement of the scattering and absorption coefficients, allowing for a complete description of the processes governing radiative transfer. We employ a photon-counting detector to overcome the high losses associated with diffuse optics. The instrument is highly portable and rugged, making it optimally suited for deployment in remote regions. A set of measurements taken on Crook and Collier Glaciers, Oregon, serves as a demonstration of the technique. These measurements provide insight into both physical structure and composition of near-surface glacier ice and open new avenues for the analysis of light-absorbing impurities and remote sensing of the cryosphere.

Listeners can adapt to errors in foreign-accented speech, but not all errors are alike. We investigated whether exposure to unsystematic tone errors in second language Mandarin impacts responses to accurately produced words. Native Mandarin speakers completed a cross-modal priming task with words produced by foreign-accented talkers who either produced consistently correct tones, or frequent tone errors. Facilitation from primes bearing correct tones was unaffected by the presence of tone errors elsewhere in the talker's speech. However, primes bearing tone errors inhibited recognition of real words and elicited stronger accentedness ratings. We consider theoretical implications for tone in foreign-accent adaptation.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of studies employing psychophysiological methods to explain variation in political attitudes and behavior. However, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of physiological data present novel challenges for political scientists unfamiliar with the underlying biological concepts and technical skills necessary for utilizing this approach. Our objective in this article is to maximize the effectiveness of future work utilizing psychophysiological measurement by providing guidance on how the techniques can be employed most fruitfully as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing methods. We develop clear, step-by-step instructions for how physiological research should be conducted and provide a discussion of the issues commonly faced by scholars working with these measures. Our hope is that this article will be a useful resource for both neophytes and experienced scholars in lowering the start-up costs to doing this work and assessing it as part of the peer review process. More broadly, in the spirit of the open science framework, we aim to foster increased communication, collaboration, and replication of findings across political science labs utilizing psychophysiological methods.

The Vaigat Iceberg-Microbial Oil Degradation and Archaeological Heritage Investigation (VIMOA) project records the results of archaeological survey of five sites in Greenland that are threatened by extreme weather conditions related to climate change. The project demonstrates the advantages of collaboration between archaeologists and natural scientists, and provides a repository of data to help preserve the archaeological record.

Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, e.g., perceiving [stið] as [estið] (Cuetos, Hallé, Domínguez & Segui, 2011), but this illusion is weaker for Spanish speakers who know English, which lacks the illusion (Carlson, Goldrick, Blasingame & Fink, 2016). The present study aimed to shed light on why this occurs by assessing how a brief interval spent using English impacts performance in Spanish auditory discrimination and lexical decision. Late Spanish–English bilinguals’ pattern of responses largely matched that of monolinguals, but their response times revealed significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between bilinguals who had just completed tasks in English vs. Spanish. These results suggest that late bilinguals do not simply learn to perceive initial [s]-consonant sequences veridically, but that elements of both their phonotactic systems interact dynamically during speech perception, as listeners work to identify what it was they just heard.

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and wh-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and non-syntactic information to resolve syntactic ambiguity by extending our understanding of number features as a cue for interpretation to which-subject and which-object questions. We compared children's and adults’ eye-movements to understand how this information shapes children's commitment to and revision of possible interpretations of these questions. The results showed that English-speaking adults and children both exhibit an initial preference to interpret an object-which question as a subject question. While adults quickly override this preference, children take significantly longer, showing an overall processing difficulty for object questions. Crucially, their recovery from an initially erroneous interpretation is speeded when disambiguating number agreement features are present.

We assessed the ability of climatic, environmental, and anthropogenic variables to predict areas of high-risk for plant invasion and consider the relative importance and contribution of these predictor variables by considering two spatial scales in a region of rapidly changing climate. We created predictive distribution models, using Maxent, for three highly invasive plant species (Canada thistle, white sweetclover, and reed canarygrass) in Alaska at both a regional scale and a local scale. Regional scale models encompassed southern coastal Alaska and were developed from topographic and climatic data at a 2 km (1.2 mi) spatial resolution. Models were applied to future climate (2030). Local scale models were spatially nested within the regional area; these models incorporated physiographic and anthropogenic variables at a 30 m (98.4 ft) resolution. Regional and local models performed well (AUC values > 0.7), with the exception of one species at each spatial scale. Regional models predict an increase in area of suitable habitat for all species by 2030 with a general shift to higher elevation areas; however, the distribution of each species was driven by different climate and topographical variables. In contrast local models indicate that distance to right-of-ways and elevation are associated with habitat suitability for all three species at this spatial level. Combining results from regional models, capturing long-term distribution, and local models, capturing near-term establishment and distribution, offers a new and effective tool for highlighting at-risk areas and provides insight on how variables acting at different scales contribute to suitability predictions. The combinations also provides easy comparison, highlighting agreement between the two scales, where long-term distribution factors predict suitability while near-term do not and vice versa.

Eye fixation measures were used to examine English relative clause processing by adult ASL–English bilingual deaf readers. Participants processed subject relative clauses faster than object relative clauses, but expected animacy cues eliminated processing difficulty in object relative clauses. This brings into question previous claims that deaf readers’ sentence processing strategies are qualitatively different from those of hearing English native speakers. Measures of English comprehension predicted reading speed, but not differences in syntactic processing. However, a trend for ASL self-ratings to predict the ability to handle syntactic complexity approached significance. Results suggest a need to explore how objective ASL proficiency measures might provide insights into deaf readers’ ability to exploit syntactic cues in English.

How does the choice of electoral rules affect politicians' incentives to campaign on the basis of personalized support? This article examines to what extent the adoption of new electoral and campaign finance rules affects the incentive of politicians in Japan's Liberal Democratic Party to rely on personal support organizations called koenkai. The core of the analysis utilizes newly collected campaign finance data. The empirical analyses confirm a considerable weakening in the number of koenkai across systems as well as a decreased need for politicians to spend money in the proportional representation tier. These results highlight the importance of previous organizational legacies as well as the efforts of political actors to mitigate the effects of rule change on their election and reelection prospects.

Word-initial /s/-consonant clusters do not occur in Spanish. Confronted with such sequences (e.g., in loanwords), Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory initial /e/, ‘repairing’ the illicit sequence. In two experiments, both conducted in Spanish with Spanish-sounding nonwords, we ask whether knowledge of English, which has no restriction against this sound sequence, weakens this pattern of perceptual repair in fluent Spanish–English bilinguals, and whether the effects of English depend on language dominance. In both identification and discrimination tasks, bilinguals exhibited weaker perceptual repair effects relative to Spanish monolinguals. This was true even for bilinguals dominant in Spanish, though the weakening was more pronounced for English-dominant bilinguals. These results show that conflicting phonotactic systems can jointly influence bilinguals’ perceptual repair of the acoustic signal in the more restrictive language, even when it is the bilingual's dominant language, suggesting a degree of integration and mutual influence of knowledge between both their languages.