It is well established that verb-noun collocations are difficult for L2 learners, but little is known about the extent to which such collocations are vulnerable to attrition under conditions of reduced input. The study is novel in that we focus on L2 attrition rather than L1 attrition, and because we focus on Saudi Arabian returnees, who have so far hardly been studied. These are compared to child, adolescent and adult heritage speakers in the US. Receptive knowledge of English collocations was measured with a novel online acceptability judgement task and an online gap-filling task. We found that child returnees experienced more difficulties than the adolescent returnees, because the child returnees had not acquired collocations to the same extent as the adolescent returnees, and they experienced more crosslinguistic influence from Arabic. The current study also provides some counter evidence against the claim that every bilingual is an attriter.

The present study investigated whether children’s difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-canonical structures with differing word orders and the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues. Forty five-to-ten-year-old Mandarin-speaking children were tested and compared to adults. Results showed that children were indistinguishable from adults in how they used different cues in real-time, although their performance in offline comprehension and production was more prone to errors but improved given the increase of age. These results suggest that the current child sample has adult-like cue-use patterns and use late-arriving cues to revise misinterpretations. The observed worse offline accuracy and production difficulties relative to adults result from their less developed domain-general abilities in performing tasks.

In our paper testing the Cutler–Hawkins hypothesis that suffixes are easier to process than prefixes (Harris & Samuel 2025), we report little experimental support for the hypothesis. Several sources treat clitics as being similar to affixes (e.g. Himmelmann 2014, Asao 2015), and some argue that there is a parallel preference for enclitics over proclitics (Cysouw 2005, Dryer 2017). On this basis, we test an extension of the Cutler–Hawkins hypothesis to clitics because if true, that too could explain the suffixing preference (as well as the putative enclitic preference). Cutler et al. (1985) also state a hypothesis about the processing of infixes. Udi provides an excellent language for testing both hypotheses, since each person clitic in this language can occur before the verb, after the verb, between morphemes of the verb or inside the verbal root, under certain circumstances (Harris 2002). Although European Portuguese does not place clitics inside roots, it utilizes the other three placements. We have conducted three experiments on each language. The results demonstrate that an explanation for either the suffixing preference or the putative enclitic preference is unlikely to be grounded in the processing factors suggested by Cutler & Hawkins.

The hypothesis that affixes following a stem are easier to process than ones preceding has not been tested in a straightforward manner in any language, as far as we know. Cutler, Hawkins & Gilligan (1985) and Hawkins & Cutler (1988) adduce some evidence that supports this hypothesis indirectly, but they do not conduct experiments to test it directly. They use this hypothesis to explain in part the suffixing preference. Some others, such as Asao (2015), continue to assume the correctness of the hypothesis. We do not aim to explain the suffixing preference at all but to test the hypothesis that affixes preceding the stem (informally, prefixes) disrupt the comprehension of a word more than affixes that follow (informally, suffixes) do. In this paper we test this hypothesis (henceforth the ‘Cutler--Hawkins hypothesis’) on Georgian, because it has a wide variety of prefixes and suffixes, and in a single experiment on English. In Georgian we test a prefix and a suffix that mark the person of the subject in a verb, a circumfix and a suffix that mark derivation in nouns, and a prefix and a suffix that form intransitive verbs (usually called ‘passives’ in Georgian). Across the set of experiments, we find little support for the Cutler--Hawkins hypothesis.

Estudios previos han mostrado que la Lama guanicoe fue la presa principal de los cazadores-recolectores que habitaron Patagonia a lo largo del Holoceno. No obstante, su forma de aprovechamiento pudo haber variado a lo largo del tiempo en respuesta a las condiciones paleoambientales y a la dinámica poblacional. Sin embargo, hasta la actualidad esta problemática ha sido poco explorada en la cuenca del río Santa Cruz (Patagonia, Argentina). En este trabajo se analiza la existencia de variaciones en el procesamiento del guanaco por parte de los grupos humanos que habitaron el sitio Río Bote 1 entre circa 4200 y 350 años aP. Los resultados alcanzados, si bien sugieren continuidades, tales como el predominio de una estrategia basada en el aprovechamiento de su porción apendicular, también señalan la existencia de variaciones en el procesamiento de sus recursos a lo largo del tiempo. Estas últimas parecen relacionarse tanto con los efectos de las fluctuaciones climáticas, como con los cambios demográficos en las poblaciones humanas.

Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated.

A visual-world experiment explores how Italian-learning children (N=38, 2;4–5;3) process noun-adjective phrases and whether their processing strategies adapt based on the adjective class. Our investigation substantiates the proficient integration of noun and adjective semantics by children. Nevertheless, alligning with previous research, a notable asymmetry is evident in the interpretation of nouns and adjectives, the latter being integrated more slowly. Remarkably, by testing toddlers across a wide age range, we observe a developmental trajectory in processing, supporting a continuity approach to children’s development. Moreover, we reveal that children exhibit sensitivity to the distinct interpretations associated with each subsective adjective.

The application of ceramic membranes is limited by the high cost of raw materials and the sintering process at high temperatures. To overcome these drawbacks, the present study investigated both the preparation of ceramic membranes using cost-effective raw materials and the possibility of recycling the membranes for the treatment of oily wastewater. Ceramic membranes with a pore size of 0.29–0.67 μm were prepared successfully at temperatures as low as 1000–1100°C by a simple pressing route using lowcost base materials including diatomite, kaolin, bentonite, talc, sodium borate, and barium carbonate. The typical steady-state flux, fouling resistance, and oil-rejection rate of the low-cost virgin membranes sintered at 1000°C were 2.5 × 10−5 m3m−2s−1 at 303 kPa, 63.5%, and 84.1%, respectively, with a feed oil concentration of 600 mg/L. A simple burn-out process of the used membranes at 600°C in air resulted in >95% recovery of the specific surface area (SSA) of the virgin membranes, a significantly increased steady-state flux, decreased fouling resistance, and increased oil-rejection rate. The typical steady-state flux, fouling resistance, and oil-rejection rate of the low-cost ceramic membrane sintered at 1000°C and subsequently heat treated at 600°C for 1 h in air after the first filtration were 5.4 × 10−5 m3m−2s−1 at 303 kPa, 27.1%, and 92.9%, respectively, with a feed oil concentration of 600 mg/L. The present results suggest that the low-cost ceramic membranes used for oily wastewater filtration can be recycled by simple heat-treatment at 600°C in air. As the fouling resistance of the low-cost ceramic membranes decreased with a decrease in pore size, the preferred pore size of the membranes for oily wastewater filtration is <0.4 μm.

Previous research suggests that child HSs’ performance in offline linguistic tasks is typically worse than their age-matched monolingual peers and is modulated by linguistic and child-level factors. This study examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical structures in 5- to 9-year-old Mandarin–English heritage children and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, including an online processing task. Results showed that heritage children had different performance in production and offline comprehension across structures compared to monolinguals. In online processing, they showed sensitivity to different cues similarly to monolinguals but took longer to revise initial misinterpretations. Within heritage children, we found that presence of morphosyntactic cues facilitated performance across tasks while cross-linguistic influence was only identified in production and offline comprehension but not in online processing. Additionally, input quantity predicted their production and offline comprehension accuracy of non-canonical structures, whereas age modulated their production. Lastly, online processing was not modulated by age nor input.

This research paper aimed to locate protein modifications caused by treatment of milk and determine if the modification locations were consistent. The majority of milk for consumption is homogenised using pressure and heat, and this causes changes in the location of proteins in the milk as well as protein modifications. To investigate these proteomic changes, raw milk was pasteurised (72°C, 15 s), then, to separate the treatment for homogenisation, heated at these different pressures and temperatures: 45°C without no pressure applied, 45°C with 35 MPa, 80°C without pressure applied and 80°C, with 35 MPa. Proteomic analysis was done after separating the milk into three fractions: whey, casein and cream. Protein modifications in each fraction were examined and we found Maillard products as well as oxidation to be of interest. The proteins were also further identified and characterised to compare protein modification sites and differences in proteins present in the cream resulting from homogenisation and/or pasteurisation. This experiment showed that both heat and pressure during homogenisation can cause increases in protein modifications as a result of oxidation or the Maillard reaction. Total cysteine oxidation and total proline oxidation differed between treatments although this was only significantly different for cysteine. It was observed that protein modifications occurred in the same location in the protein sequence rather than in random locations which we highlighted by examining α-S1-casein, lactadherin and β-lactoglobulin.

The aim of this study is to determine whether it is the phonetic or phonological effect on processing that is stronger when the two effects are in conflict. Results are presented from a recall experiment, in which speakers of French and Tłı̨chǫ (Dene, Canada) recall syllables with either H or L tone. While French speakers remembered H syllables more accurately, Tłı̨chǫ speakers remembered L tones more accurately. The findings show simultaneous effects of phonetics and phonology, and have implications for notions of salience and how it can be measured as well as for the different types of salience that are active in speech sound processing.