The evolution of languages provides a unique opportunity to study human population history. The origin of Semitic and the nature of dispersals by Semitic-speaking populations are of great importance to our understanding of the ancient history of the Middle East and Horn of Africa. Semitic populations are associated with the oldest written languages and urban civilizations in the region, which g...

INTRODUCTION Paper has been the dominating means for capturing and storing written language for several centuries. Recently, computers have been established in this domain at the same time offering a far wider range of features. This has led many to believe that the use of paper might be completely replaced by computers in the near future. Yet there is no empirical data supporting such a hypoth...

Research on written language comprehension has generally assumed that the phonological properties of a word have little effect on sentence comprehension beyond the processes of word recognition. Two experiments investigated this assumption. Participants silently read relative clauses in which two pairs of words either did or did not have a high degree of phonological overlap. Participants were ...

he discovery, from the 1960s until the present, of a small corpus of about twenty texts concerning strings, tuning, and performance from ancient Iraq (loosely equivalent to “Mesopotamia”) and Syria has transformed our view of the earliest stages of music history. Not only is this corpus by far the earliest recorded expression of what might be called “music theory,” but these texts also belong t...