Abstract With smart speakers diffusing into society, artificial intelligence is moving from the imaginative reservoirs of dystopian storytelling vernacular living. How do users perceive communication with it? Are Alexa and Siri considered simple devices, sentient assistants, or even friends? Based on nine qualitative interviews former speaker in Germany, this study analyzes use related personal...

Abstract Ignatius of Antioch makes very little reference to specific texts from the Scriptures Israel. This has been interpreted as evidence interest in Scripture, which, turn used plot on a parting ways trajectory. The for this interpretation is weak. refers Scripture way that comparable some Pauline letters. Furthermore, his statements about and use suggest he differs hermeneutical assumption...

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they s...

Evidence suggests that binding, or encoding a feature with respect to other features in time and space, can convey cognitive advantages. However, evidence across many kinds of stimuli and paradigms presents a mixed picture, alternatively showing cognitive costs or cognitive advantages associated with maintaining bound representations. We examined memory for colored letters drawn from similar an...