Linguistic inputs must be syntactically parsable to fully engage the language network.

Human language comprehension is remarkably robust to ill-formed inputs (e.g., word transpositions). This robustness has led some to argue that syntactic parsing is largely an illusion, and that incremental comprehension is more heuristic, shallow, and semantics-based than is often assumed. However, the available data are also consistent with the possibility that humans always perform rule-like symbolic parsing and simply deploy error correction mechanisms to reconstruct ill-formed inputs when needed. We put these hypotheses to a new stringent test by examining brain responses to a) stimuli that should pose a challenge for syntactic reconstruction but allow for complex meanings to be built within local contexts through associative/shallow processing (sentences presented in a backward word order), and b) grammatically well-formed but semantically implausible sentences that should impede semantics-based heuristic processing. Using a novel behavioral syntactic reconstruction paradigm, we demonstrate that backward- presented sentences indeed impede the recovery of grammatical structure during incremental comprehension. Critically, these backward-presented stimuli elicit a relatively low response in the language areas, as measured with fMRI. In contrast, semantically implausible but grammatically well-formed sentences elicit a response in the language areas similar in magnitude to naturalistic (plausible) sentences. In other words, the ability to build syntactic structures during incremental language processing is both necessary and sufficient to fully engage the language network. Taken together, these results provide strongest to date support for a generalized reliance of human language comprehension on syntactic parsing. Significance statement: Whether language comprehension relies predominantly on structural (syntactic) cues or meaning- related (semantic) cues remains debated. We shed new light on this question by examining the language brain areas' responses to stimuli where syntactic and semantic cues are pitted against each other, using fMRI. We find that the language areas respond weakly to stimuli that allow for local semantic composition but cannot be parsed syntactically-as confirmed in a novel behavioral paradigm-and they respond strongly to grammatical but semantically implausible sentences, like the famous 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' sentence. These findings challenge accounts of language processing that suggest that syntactic parsing can be foregone in favor of shallow semantic processing.

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.

Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

Integrated Measure of PRogram Element SuStainability in Childcare Settings (IMPRESS-C): development and psychometric evaluation of a measure of sustainability determinants in the early childhood education and care setting.

BACKGROUND: There is a need for valid and reliable measures of determinants of sustainability of public health interventions in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. This study aimed to develop and evaluate the psychometric and pragmatic properties of such a measure - the Integrated Measure of PRogram Element SuStainability in Childcare Settings (IMPRESS-C). METHODS: We undertook a two-phase process guided by the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health status Measurement INstruments checklist (COSMIN) and Psychometric and Pragmatic Evidence Rating Scale (PAPERS). Phase 1 involved measure development; i.e., determining items and scales through an iterative process and assessment of face and content validity. Phase 2 involved the evaluation of psychometric and pragmatic properties. The 29-item measure completed by service executives (directors and nominated supervisors) was embedded in a larger survey from a national sample of Australian ECEC services assessing their implementation of nutrition and physical activity programs. Structural validity, concurrent validity, known groups validity, internal consistency, floor and ceiling effects, norms, and pragmatic qualities of the measure were assessed according to the PAPERS criteria. RESULTS: The final measure contained 26 items, with respondents reporting how strongly they agreed or disagreed on a five-point Likert scale. Phase 1 assessments confirmed the relevance, and face and content validity of the scale. In Phase 2, we obtained 482 completed surveys, of which 84% (n = 405) completed the entire measure across 405 ECEC settings (one executive per service). Three of the four fit indices for the confirmatory factor analysis met the pre-specified criteria (SRMR = 0.056, CFI = 0.993, RMSEA = 0.067) indicating 'good' structural validity. The IMPRESS-C illustrated: 'good' internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha values from 0.53 to 0.92; 'emerging' concurrent validity; 'poor' known groups validity; 'good' norms; and 'good' overall pragmatic qualities (cost, readability, length, and assessor burden). CONCLUSIONS: The IMPRESS-C possesses strong psychometric and pragmatic qualities for assessing service executive-level perceptions of determinants influencing sustainment of public health interventions within ECEC settings. To achieve a full range of perspectives in this setting, future work should be directed to also develop and test measures of sustainability determinants at the implementer level (e.g., among individual educators and staff).

A systematic review to determine the effect of strategies to sustain chronic disease prevention interventions in clinical and community settings: study protocol.

BACKGROUND: The primary purpose of this review is to synthesise the effect of strategies aiming to sustain the implementation of evidenced-based interventions (EBIs) targeting key health behaviours associated with chronic disease (i.e. physical inactivity, poor diet, harmful alcohol use, and tobacco smoking) in clinical and community settings. The field of implementation science is bereft of an evidence base of effective sustainment strategies, and as such, this review will provide important evidence to advance the field of sustainability research. METHODS: This systematic review protocol is reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) checklist. Methods will follow Cochrane gold-standard review methodology. The search will be undertaken across multiple databases, adapting filters previously developed by the research team, data screening and extraction will be performed in duplicate, strategies will be coded using an adapted sustainability-explicit taxonomy, and evidence will be synthesised using appropriate methods (i.e. meta-analytic following Cochrane or non-meta-analytic following SWiM guidelines). We will include any randomised controlled study that targets any staff or volunteers delivering interventions in clinical or community settings. Studies which report on any objective or subjective measure of the sustainment of a health prevention policy, practice, or programme within any of the eligible settings will be included. Article screening, data extraction, risk of bias, and quality assessment will be performed independently by two review authors. Risk of bias will be assessed using Version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomised trials (RoB 2). A random-effect meta-analysis will be conducted to estimate the pooled effect of sustainment strategies separately by setting (i.e. clinical and community). Sub-group analyses will be undertaken to explore possible causes of statistical heterogeneity and may include the following: time period, single or multi-strategy, type of setting, and type of intervention. Differences between sub-groups will be statistically compared. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: This will be the first systematic review to determine the effect of strategies designed to support sustainment on sustaining the implementation of EBIs in clinical and community settings. The findings of this review will directly inform the design of future sustainability-focused implementation trials. Further, these findings will inform the development of a sustainability practice guide for public health practitioners. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42022352333.

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts-collectively referred to as the "plain-language movement"-have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period. We also compared the entirety of the U.S. Code (the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force) with a large sample of recently published texts from six baseline genres of English. We found that laws remain laden with features associated with psycholinguistic complexity-including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon, capitalization, and sentence length-relative to the baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined since the initial onset of the plain-language efforts. These findings suggest top-down efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, and call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal doctrines whose validity rests on the notion of laws being easily interpretable by laypeople. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

It is not what you say but how you say it: Evidence from Russian shows robust effects of the structural prior on noisy channel inferences.

Under the noisy-channel framework of language comprehension, comprehenders infer the speaker's intended meaning by integrating the perceived utterance with their knowledge of the language, the world, and the kinds of errors that can occur in communication. Previous research has shown that, when sentences are improbable under the meaning prior (implausible sentences), participants often interpret them nonliterally. The rate of nonliteral interpretation is higher when the errors that could have transformed the intended utterance into the perceived utterance are more likely. However, previous experiments on noisy channel processing mostly relied on implausible sentences, and it is unclear whether participants' nonliteral interpretations were evidence of noisy channel processing or the result of trying to conform to the experimenter's expectations in an experiment with nonsensical sentences. In the current study, we used the unique properties of Russian, an understudied language in the psycholinguistics literature, to test noisy-channel comprehension using only simple plausible sentences. The prior plausibility of sentences was tied only to their word order; subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences were more probable under the structural prior than object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences. In two experiments, we show that participants often interpret OVS sentences nonliterally, and the probability of nonliteral interpretations depended on the Levenshtein distance between the perceived sentence and the (potentially intended) SVO version of the sentence. The results show that the structural prior guides people's final interpretation, independent of the presence of semantic implausibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Kajian Rintis Penilaian Literasi Digital: Kesediaan Guru Prasekolah Menggunakan Platform Pembelajaran dalam Talian untuk Pendidikan Pemakanan (A Pilot Study Assessing Digital Literacy: Preschool Teachers’ Readiness to Use Online Learning Platforms in Nutrition Education) / Jurnal Sains Kesihatan Malaysia

@#eToyBox is a learning management system for preschool teachers to improve their health literacy, which ultimately aims to improve children’s obesity-related behaviour. As part of the development process of eToyBox, assessment on digital literacy, acceptance of digitization of education materials, and perceived barriers in adopting online learning is needed. Fifty-four preschool teachers under the Community Development Department (KEMAS) in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, and Sarawak, who participated in ToyBox Study Malaysia intervention in 2018, took part in this cross-sectional study. An online self-administered questionnaire was used to assess sociodemographic background, use of communication tools and media, and teacher’s views on adapting the ToyBox modules to digital education materials. Respondents were contacted, and questionnaire link was shared through WhatsApp messages. Most participants (74.0%) were Malay females aged 31 to 40 years old. Most participants had internet access (94.4%) and owned at least a smart phone, laptop or tablet (94.4%). Participants perceived their computer skills to be average (75.0%). Majority of respondents (65.0%) reported advanced and higher abilities in word processing and email, but only 22.0% in spreadsheet skills. The main barrier to accessing online material was unstable internet connection (74.1%). Most respondents (90.0%) agree that adapting effective modules to online learning will be beneficial for professional development and teaching practices. In conclusion, most participants supported digitizing Toybox Study Malaysia educational content and were comfortable 72 with its implementation via an online learning platform. The findings from this study can advise future development of online learning materials for preschool teachers in Malaysia.

Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese.

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning-the prior-and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy-channel proposal is robust.

Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane'-Spanish Bilinguals.

Words and the concepts they represent vary across languages. Here we ask if mother-tongue concepts are altered by learning a second language. What happens when speakers of Tsimane', a language with few consensus color terms, learn Bolivian Spanish, a language with more terms? Three possibilities arise: Concepts in Tsimane' may remain unaffected, or they may be remapped, either by Tsimane' terms taking on new meanings or by borrowing Bolivian-Spanish terms. We found that adult bilingual speakers (n = 30) remapped Tsimane' concepts without importing Bolivian-Spanish terms into Tsimane'. All Tsimane' terms become more precise; for example, concepts of monolingual shandyes and yushñus (~green or blue, used synonymously by Tsimane' monolinguals; n = 71) come to reflect the Bolivian-Spanish distinction of verde (~green) and azul (~blue). These results show that learning a second language can change the concepts in the first language.

A cluster randomised controlled trial to assess the effectiveness of a multi-strategy sustainability intervention on teachers' sustained implementation of classroom physical activity breaks (energisers): study protocol.

BACKGROUND: Governments internationally have invested hugely in the implementation and scale-up of school-based physical activity interventions, but have little evidence of how to best sustain these interventions once active implementation support ceases. This study will assess the effectiveness of a multi-strategy sustainability intervention on classroom teachers' sustainment of energisers (short 3-5 min physical activity breaks during class-time) scheduled across the school day from baseline to 12 and 24-month follow-up. METHODS: A cluster randomised controlled trial will be conducted in 50 primary schools within the Hunter New England, Illawarra Shoalhaven, Murrumbidgee and Northern New South Wales (NSW) Local Health Districts of NSW Australia. Schools will be randomly allocated to receive either usual support or the multi-strategy sustainability intervention that includes: centralised technical assistance from a trained project officer; formal commitment and mandated change obtained from school principals; training in-school champions; reminders for teachers; educational materials provided to teachers; capturing and sharing local knowledge; and engagement of parents, carers and the wider school community. The primary trial outcome will be measured via a teacher logbook to determine the between-group difference in the change in mean minutes of energisers scheduled across the school day at 12 and 24-month follow-up compared to baseline. Analyses will be performed using an intention to treat framework. Linear mixed models will be used to assess intervention effects on the primary outcome at both follow-up periods. DISCUSSION: This study will be one of the first randomised controlled trials to examine the impact of a multi-strategy sustainability intervention to support schools' sustainment of a physical activity intervention. The proposed research will generate new evidence needed for the partnering organisations to protect their considerable investments to date in physical activity promotion in this setting and will provide seminal evidence for the field globally. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ACTRN12620000372987 version 1 registered 17th March 2020. Version 3 (current version) updated 4th August 2023.

Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages.

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like "The dog chewed the bone" even though the status of "dog" as subject and "bone" as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility. Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar. To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text. English and Russian speakers (n = 484) were presented with subjects, verbs, and objects (in random order and with morphological markings removed) extracted from naturally occurring sentences and were asked to identify which noun is the subject of the action. Accuracy was high in both languages (∼89% in English, ∼87% in Russian). Next, we trained a neural network machine classifier on a similar task: predicting which nominal in a subject-verb-object triad is the subject. Across 30 languages from eight language families, performance was consistently high: a median accuracy of 87%, comparable to the accuracy observed in the human experiments. The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e.g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e.g., "The bone chewed the dog.").

Thrombosis incidence in major paediatric burns.

BACKGROUND: Major burns are associated with multiple risk factors for thrombosis such as decreased mobilization and systemic inflammation. It is unclear if these factors are offset by the inherent lower thrombosis risk in the paediatric patient. As such there is no consensus on thromboprophylaxis for paediatric burns patients, in contrast to this being a mainstay of treatment in the adult population. This retrospective cohort study examines the incidence of, and risk factors for, thrombotic events in major paediatric burns with a view to establish guidelines for prevention. METHOD: Review of major paediatric burns, defined as % total body surface area (%TBSA) ≥30%, at the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital (WCH) over a 16-year period. Coding data and the local burns database were used to identify participants with subsequent review of case files. RESULTS: Of the cohort (n = 23), six cases (26%) were complicated by thrombotic events. These patients had the most extensive burns averaging 68.5% TBSA, longer PICU admissions and associated interventions. These data points were more than doubled in the cohort diagnosed with a thrombus. Of the six events, five were secondary to central venous catheters (CVC) and one deep venous thrombosis (DVT) to the left calf. CONCLUSION: The incidence of thrombotic events in our study was significant albeit in a small population. There is a strong association between large %TBSA and thrombus, with clots mostly forming around CVCs. While further research is required, this study demonstrates screening and targeted thromboprophylaxis may be required for major paediatric burns.

From ToyBox Study to eToyBox: Advancing Childhood Obesity Reduction in Malaysian Kindergartens.

Prevention and treatment of childhood obesity is a global concern, and in Malaysia, it is considered a national public health priority. Determinants of childhood obesity are multifactorial and include factors that directly and indirectly influence energy balance-related behaviours, including energy intake and energy expenditure. Interventions to address childhood obesity that have multiple components at different levels have been shown to be the most influential. The ToyBox-study is a childhood obesity intervention aimed at preschool-aged children and their families that had been shown to be effective in several European countries and so was chosen for adaption for the Malaysian setting. Materials were translated and adjusted for the Malaysian context and audience and implemented in kindergartens in Peninsular Malaysia and Sarawak. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, teaching transitioned to being online. This brought an opportunity to reach a wider audience and consider the long-term sustainability of the intervention, and thus eToybox was born. eToybox aims to bring support for healthy energy balance behaviours directly to the teachers, into kindergartens and homes, to encourage families to be active and eat healthily, and prevent or reduce obesity. Through online innovation, the Toybox Study Malaysia programme has been expanded to enhance its potential to impact the promotion of healthy lifestyles among preschoolers and their families, highlighting the importance of a holistic approach to preventing and treating childhood obesity in Malaysia.

Diverse mathematical knowledge among indigenous Amazonians.

We investigate number and arithmetic learning among a Bolivian indigenous people, the Tsimane', for whom formal schooling is comparatively recent in history and variable in both extent and consistency. We first present a large-scale meta-analysis on child number development involving over 800 Tsimane' children. The results emphasize the impact of formal schooling: Children are only found to be full counters when they have attended school, suggesting the importance of cultural support for early mathematics. We then test especially remote Tsimane' communities and document the development of specialized arithmetical knowledge in the absence of direct formal education. Specifically, we describe individuals who succeed on arithmetic problems involving the number five-which has a distinct role in the local economy-even though they do not succeed on some lower numbers. Some of these participants can perform multiplication with fives at greater accuracy than addition by one. These results highlight the importance of cultural factors in early mathematics and suggest that psychological theories of number where quantities are derived from lower numbers via repeated addition (e.g., a successor function) are unlikely to explain the diversity of human mathematical ability.

A systematic review to determine the effect of strategies to sustain chronic disease prevention interventions in clinical and community settings: study protocol.

Background: The primary purpose of this review is to synthesise the effect of strategies aiming to sustain the implementation of evidenced based interventions (EBIs) targeting key health behaviours associated with chronic disease (i.e., physical inactivity, poor diet, harmful alcohol use and tobacco smoking) in clinical and community settings. The field of implementation science is bereft of an evidence base of effective sustainment strategies, and as such this review will provide important evidence to advance the field of sustainability research. Methods: This systematic review protocol is reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P) checklist (Additional file 1). Methods will follow Cochrane gold-standard review methodology. The search will be undertaken across multiple databases, adapting filters previously developed by the research team; data screening and extraction will be performed in duplicate; strategies will be coded using an adapted sustainability-explicit taxonomy; evidence will be synthesised using appropriate methods (i.e. meta-analytic following Cochrane or non-meta-analytic following SWiM guidelines). We will include any randomised controlled study that targets any staff or volunteers delivering interventions in clinical or community settings. Studies which report on any objective or subjective measure of the sustainment of a health prevention policy, practice, or program within any of the eligible settings will be included. Article screening, data extraction, risk of bias and quality assessment will be performed independently by two review authors. Risk of bias will be assessed using Version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomised trials (RoB 2). A random effect meta-analysis will be conducted to estimate the pooled effect of sustainment strategies separately by setting (i.e. clinical and community). Sub-group analyses will be undertaken to explore possible causes of statistical heterogeneity and may include: time period, single or multi strategy, type of setting and type of intervention. Differences between sub-groups will be statistically compared. Discussion/Conclusion: This will be the first systematic review to determine the effect of strategies designed to support sustainment on sustaining the implementation of EBIs in clinical and community settings. The findings of this review will directly inform the design of future sustainability-focused implementation trials. Further, these findings will inform the development of a sustainability practice guide for public health practitioners. Registration: This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (registration ID: CRD42022352333).

Color appearance and the end of Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory.

Hering's Opponent-Colors Theory has been central to understanding color appearance for 150 years. It aims to explain the phenomenology of colors with two linked propositions. First, a psychological hypothesis stipulates that any color is described necessarily and sufficiently by the extent to which it appears reddish-versus-greenish, bluish-versus-yellowish, and blackish-versus-whitish. Second, a physiological hypothesis stipulates that these perceptual mechanisms are encoded by three innate brain mechanisms. We review the evidence and conclude that neither side of the linking proposition is accurate: the theory is wrong. We sketch out an alternative, Utility-Based Coding, by which the known retinal cone-opponent mechanisms represent optimal encoding of spectral information given competing selective pressure to extract high-acuity spatial information; and phenomenological color categories represent an adaptive, efficient, output of the brain governed by behavioral demands.

The effect of context on noisy-channel sentence comprehension.

The process of sentence comprehension must allow for the possibility of noise in the input, e.g., from speaker error, listener mishearing, or environmental noise. Consequently, semantically implausible sentences such as The girl tossed the apple the boy are often interpreted as a semantically plausible alternative (e.g., The girl tossed the apple to the boy). Previous investigations of noisy-channel comprehension have relied exclusively on paradigms with isolated sentences. Because supportive contexts alter the expectations of possible interpretations, the noisy channel framework predicts that context should encourage more inference in interpreting implausible sentences, relative to null contexts (i.e. a lack of context) or unsupportive contexts. In the present work, we tested this prediction in four types of sentence constructions: two where inference is relatively frequent (double object - prepositional object), and two where inference is rare (active-passive). We found evidence that in the two sentence types that commonly elicit inference, supportive contexts encourage noisy-channel inferences about the intended meaning of implausible sentences more than non-supportive contexts or null contexts. These results suggest that noisy-channel inference may be more pervasive in everyday language processing than previously assumed based on work with isolated sentences.

Even lawyers do not like legalese.

Across modern civilization, societal norms and rules are established and communicated largely in the form of written laws. Despite their prevalence and importance, legal documents have long been widely acknowledged to be difficult to understand for those who are required to comply with them (i.e., everyone). Why? Across two preregistered experiments, we evaluated five hypotheses for why lawyers write in a complex manner. Experiment 1 revealed that lawyers, like laypeople, were less able to recall and comprehend legal content drafted in a complex "legalese" register than content of equivalent meaning drafted in a simplified register. Experiment 2 revealed that lawyers rated simplified contracts as equally enforceable as legalese contracts, and rated simplified contracts as preferable to legalese contracts on several dimensions-including overall quality, appropriateness of style, and likelihood of being signed by a client. These results suggest that lawyers who write in a convoluted manner do so as a matter of convenience and tradition as opposed to an outright preference and that simplifying legal documents would be both tractable and beneficial for lawyers and nonlawyers alike.

Real-time inference in communication across cultures: Evidence from a nonindustrialized society.

In everyday communication, speakers and listeners make sophisticated inferences about their conversation partner's intended meaning. They combine their knowledge of the visuospatial context with reasoning about the other person's knowledge state and rely on shared assumptions about how language is used to express communicative intentions. However, these assumptions may differ between languages of nonindustrialized-where conversations often primarily take place within a, so-called, society of intimates-and industrialized cultures-societies of strangers. Here, we study inference in communication in the Tsimane', an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, who have little contact with industrialization or formal education. Using a referential communication task, we probe how Tsimane' speakers refer to objects in the world around them when there are potential ambiguities (e.g., referring to a cup when there are multiple cups in view) across different visual contexts. Using an eye-tracking task, we probe the real-time inferences that Tsimane' listeners make about the speaker's intentions. We find that Tsimane' speakers use visual (color, size) contrasts to disambiguate referents (e.g., "Hand me the small cup"), much like English speakers, and they predictively direct their gaze to objects in a contrast set when they hear a modifier (e.g., "small"). Despite myriad cultural and linguistic dissimilarities between the two populations, the qualitative patterns of behavior and eye-gaze of Tsimane' and English speakers were strikingly similar, suggesting that the communicative expectations underlying many everyday inferences may be shared across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).