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A fundamental function of natural language is to focus the interlocutor’s attention to specific entities and circumstances from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. In other words, as an utterance progresses, the narrower its reference typically becomes. Intriguingly, there is substantial convergence in the neural localization of conceptual specificity effects at the single word level and combinatory effects at the phrasal level, both systematically affecting the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL). However, the relationship between these two types of effects is not well understood. The current study used MEG to characterize the temporal progression of both types of effects in minimal two-word phrases (e.g., tomato soup), where single word specificity was varied in both first and second position (e.g., tomato vs. vegetable; soup vs. dish). These combinatory phrases were further compared to non-combinatory single nouns of high and low specificity. Our most robust result was an effect of the specificity of the first word while processing the second word: responses to the second word were the largest when it was being composed with a more specific as opposed to a more general modifier. In the modifier position, specificity had no reliable effects, while non-combinatory single nouns did show a subtle LATL increase when specific. In all, our findings show that when non-semantic factors such as frequency are controlled for, conceptual specificity weakly modulates LATL activity in non-combinatory situations (i.e., at a single noun), but robustly affects the size of the LATL composition effect. Thus LATL activity appears to be most strongly driven by the composition of concepts as opposed to access to single concepts. •We investigated the functional role of the left anterior temporal lobe using MEG.•The LATL shows semantic effects at both the single word and phrasal level.•Single words representing more specific concepts subtly elicited larger amplitudes.•The noun-noun composition effect was strongly modulated by the modifier specificity.•Our results suggested the two semantic effects of LATL are fundamentally connected.

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has sped up the use of digital platforms in educational settings, with TikTok playing a vital role in promoting learning and engagement. This study investigates the role of TikTok in shaping users’ psychological well-being and educational outcomes during this period of disruption. Data collection involved a cross-sectional approach, surveying 1,219 university students in China via an online questionnaire. The study employed convenience sampling and analyzed responses with SPSS software, focusing on constructs such as TikTok engagement, psychological well-being, educational content, and various educational outcomes. Measurement properties of the constructs were robust, with good reliability and validity confirmed through factor loadings, internal consistency measures, and discriminant validity assessments. Common method bias was not a major concern, and the structural model demonstrated strong explanatory and predictive capabilities. The findings underscore TikTok’s dual role as both an educational tool and a factor influencing mental health, highlighting the platform’s potential benefits and challenges in a digital learning environment. This study provides valuable insights for educators and policymakers on integrating social media platforms into educational practices while addressing their impact on student well-being.

The co-gasification of biomass and coal is helpful for achieving the clean and efficient utilization of phosphorus-rich biomass. A large number of alkali and alkaline earth metals (AAEMs) present in the ash system of coal (or biomass) cause varying degrees of ash, slagging, and corrosion problems in the entrained flow gasifier. Meanwhile, phosphorus is present in the slag in the form of PO43−, which has a strong affinity for AAEMs (especially for Ca2+) to produce minerals dominated by calcium phosphates or alkaline Ca-phosphate, effectively mitigating the aforementioned problems. To investigate the changing behavior of the slag flow temperature (FT) under different CaO/P2O5 ratios, 72 synthetic ashes with varying CaO/P2O5 ratios at different Si/Al contents and compositions were prepared, and their ash fusion temperatures were tested. The effects of different CaO/P2O5 ratios on the FT were analyzed using FactSage thermodynamic simulation. A model for predicting slag FT at different CaO/P2O5 ratios was constructed on the basis of the average molar ionic potential (Ia) method and used to predict data reported from 19 mixed ashes in the literature. The results showed that Ia and FT gradually increased with a decreasing CaO/P2O5 ratio, and the main mineral types shifted from anorthite → mullite → berlinite, which reasonably explained the decrease in ash fusion temperatures in the mixed ash. The established model showed good adaptability to the prediction of 19 actual coal ash FTs in the literature; the deviation of the prediction was in the range of 40 °C. The model proposed between FT and Ia based on the different CaO/P2O5 ratios can be used to predict the low-rank coal and phosphorus-rich biomass and their mixed ashes.

Purpose To summarize the incidence, risk factors, diagnosis methods, prophylaxis methods, and treatment of venous thromboembolism (VTE) following arthroscopic shoulder surgery. Methods Literature on VTE after arthroscopic shoulder surgeries was summarized, and all primary full-text articles reporting at least 1 case of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or pulmonary embolism (PE) after arthroscopic shoulder surgeries were included. Articles were critically appraised and systematically analyzed to determine the incidence, risk factors, diagnosis, prophylaxis, and management of VTE following arthroscopic shoulder surgeries. Results This study included 42 articles in which the incidence of VTE ranges from 0 to 5.71% and the overall incidence was 0.26%. Most VTE events took place between the operation day and the 14th day after the operation (35/51). Possible risk factors included advanced age (> 70 years), obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m 2 ), diabetes mellitus, thrombophilia, history of VTE, prolonged operation time, hormone use, and immobilization after surgery. The most common prophylaxis method was mechanical prophylaxis (13/15). No statistical difference was detected when chemoprophylaxis was applied. The management included heparinization followed by oral warfarin, warfarin alone and rivaroxaban, a direct oral anticoagulant. Conclusion Based on the included studies, the incidence rate of VTE after arthroscopic shoulder surgeries is relatively low. The risk factors for VTE are still unclear. CT/CTA and ultrasound were the mainstream diagnosis methods for PE and DVT, respectively. Current evidence shows that chemical prophylaxis did not deliver significant benefits, since none of the existing studies reported statistically different results. High-quality studies focusing on the prophylaxis and management of VTE population undergoing arthroscopic shoulder surgeries should be done in the future.

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint.

Featural information (e.g., color or shape) allows interlocutors to focus their attention on the specific items under discussion from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. Intriguingly, when they are used to modify and restrict nouns, adjectives can either carry featural information themselves (e.g., green car ) or retrieve featural information from the context (e.g., somebody points at a car and claims that she has the same car or a different car ). Do the processing of same/different car and green car share neural correlates? For the composition of nouns with feature-carrying adjectives, prior work revealed early compositional effects (roughly 200 ms after noun onset) in the left anterior temporal lobe. However, although we know that such effects do not extend to cases of numeral quantification, which add no conceptual features to the noun (e.g., two boats ), we do not know whether they extend to functional adjectives that themselves introduce no features, but instead reference features in the context. To address this question, we measured magnetoencephalography (MEG) during the processing of five types of noun phrases (NPs): same NPs (e.g., same star ), different NPs (e.g., different star ), color NPs (e.g., green star ), comparative NPs (e.g., larger star ), and another NPs (e.g., another star ). Our main finding was that between 185 to 240 ms after noun onset, same and different NPs patterned with the color NPs in their elicited left temporal lobe activity, and same NPs even trended toward higher amplitudes than the color NPs. This shows that the mechanism driving combinatory effects in the left temporal cortex does not require the input words to directly name conceptual features, as long as the words reference featural information in the context, and that overlapping neural correlates underlie the composition of featural information from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources.

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint.

The true power of human language lies in its potential to communicate infinite complex and new ideas by combining a finite inventory of lexical and functional words. Though the use of functional words (and various grammatical factors encoded in them) plays a crucial role in systematically building larger linguistic constructions from smaller ones, and might potentially reflect human-specific cognitive abilities, the neural basis of functional words is still mostly not understood as compared to the processing of lexical words. This dissertation builds on previous findings on the contribution of the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) to both semantic memory and linguistic composition. We investigate the computational details of this region in processing combinatorial expressions, and in particular, in processing noun phrases and simple sentences containing functional words that encode logical operators or anaphoricity. With the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a word-by-word presentation paradigm, we conducted three language comprehension experiments, investigating the temporal progression of LATL activity during the processing of (i) noun-noun compounds varying in conceptual specificity (e.g., vegetable soup , tomato dish), (ii) positive and negative event-describing sentences with their subject DP varying in specificity (e.g., a reptile is moving, no green lizard is sleeping), and (iii) noun phrases with anaphoric functional adjectives (e.g., same star , different star). Overall, we found robust LATL effects for semantic composition – as opposed to syntactic structure building, and that it is information integration – as opposed to information access – that leads to most reliable LATL effects. More specifically, integrating more specific information leads to larger brain activation in the LATL: in processing noun-noun compounds, phrases containing more specific modifiers elicited larger LATL effects during head word presentation; at the sentential level, sentences containing a more specific subject DP caused larger LATL effects during the presentation of verbs; and under a given context, anaphoric functional adjectives such as same and different, despite their lack of featural information in their lexical meaning, elicited as robust LATL effects as lexical adjectives (e.g., green) do. These LATL effects typically peak at 200 – 300 ms after the onset of the critical word (i.e., head nouns in noun phrases, and verbal predicates in sentences), suggesting an early involvement of the LATL in semantic composition. These studies bridge theoretical investigation of natural language semantics and neurobiological research on brain mechanisms underlying language processing. We have shown, for the first time, that the processing of logical operators (e.g., sentential negation) and functional words (e.g., same, different) interacts with the processing of conceptual knowledge in the LATL in forming mental representations varying in specificity, and all these factors modulate LATL activation in integrating information and facilitating interlocutors to focus their attention to specific situations or items from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. Together, the studies in this dissertation constitute a step toward a better understanding of neurobiological basis for semantic compositionality.

This paper analyzes the three fundamental uses of gradable adjectives in Mandarin Chinese: the positive use, the comparative use, and the measurement use. I argue that the notion of comparison underlies all these three uses, and thus the meaning of comparison does not need to be marked. This explains why, in Mandarin Chinese, there is no need to morphologically make a distinction between comparative and non-comparative forms. I analyze the semantics of gradable adjectives as a relation among (i) the measurement of an individual, (ii) a standard value for comparison, and (iii) the difference between the above two. The distinction among the three uses is attributed to their distinctive standard and difference. For the positive use, the standard is a typical average; for the comparative use, the standard is a contextually salient value; and for the measurement use, the standard is the absolute zero point of the relevant scale.

Comparatives containing non-monotonic quantifiers within than-clauses pose non-trivial challenges for compositional semantics (e.g., Balloon A is higher than exactly two of the others are, see, e.g., Schwarzschild 2008). Following Bumford (2017a)’s split treatment for definiteness (see also Brasoveanu 2013), this paper argues for a two-stage semantic derivation for these comparatives: a bottom-up (from local to global) composition followed by a delayed top-down (from global to local) evaluation. More specifically, I propose that the semantic contribution of both these embedded non-monotonic quantifiers and the embedding morpheme than is twofold: first, they each introduce a discourse referent (i.e., some individual or degree-related value) during the stage of bottom-up composition; then, they simultaneously impose tests of maximality (and cardinality) during the stage of top-down evaluation. The current account further suggests that basically, the semantics of comparatives is similar to that of cumulative-reading sentences (e.g., exactly three boys saw exactly five movies), both involving simultaneous restrictions but no scope-taking among cardinalities or degree-related values. I show that this has profound implications for theories of comparatives.