Rational Markets: Yes or No? The Affirmative Case

Some Mistakes in Thinking about Affirmative Action*

Once I was a member of a university council that, among other things, played "watchdog" when decisions were being made regarding whom to appoint to high places in the univeristy administration. One of my colleague's favorite points was that if a candidate hedged with a "yes and no" or a "yes, but..." to the query, "Would you support affirmative action?", such a response should be taken as prima...

Interrogative Structures in Marshallese

Marshallese, an Oceanic language spoken on the atolls of the Marshall Islands, has a question particle, ke, which may appear in one of a number of positions in yes/no interrogatives. Interestingly, the availability of certain positions depends upon whether the sentential context is affirmative or negative. In (1), we demonstrate the various grammatical and ungrammatical positions of ke in affir...

If you negate, you may forget: negated repetitions impair memory compared with affirmative repetitions.

One of the most robust laws of memory is that repeated activation improves memory. Our study shows that the nature of repetition matters. Specifically, although both negated repetition and affirmative repetition improve memory compared with no repetition, negated repetition hinders memory compared with affirmative repetition. After showing participants different entities, we asked them about fe...

Cross-linguistic contrasts of verification and answering among children.

This review article examines how children verify a statement (e.g., You are a child. Right or wrong?) and answer a corresponding question (e.g., Are you a child? Yes or no?) in English, French, Japanese, and Korean. While people verify affirmative statements and answer affirmative questions similarly across the four languages, they answer negative questions differently across the four languages...

Genetically Modified Food: Yes or No?