The statement ”Black lives matter” is commonly construed as implying other lives matter less, even though thestatement does not explicitly reference other lives. Bias is a common explanation for this construal. However, other factors maycontribute. We hypothesized that the linguistic structure of “Black lives matter” plays an important role. ”Black lives matter”takes the form of a generic, or statements in which a property is attributed to members of a set (e.g., “lions have manes”).Generics are often interpreted as implicit comparisons (e.g., “lions are more likely to have manes than other animals”). Wereport two experiments in which we find evidence that the statement “Black lives matter” is often construed as an implicitcomparative claim, similarly to other generics. This research contributes to our understanding of generics, while providing anovel explanation for why when I say ”Black lives matter,” some people hear ”Other lives matter less.”

Congenital amusia is a lifelong musical disorder. It has been found that tonal-language speakers with amusia areimpaired in lexical tone perception. But it has also been found that tonal-language experience compensates the deficit in certainscenario, reducing prevalence rate of amusia in speakers of a highly complex tonal-language – Cantonese. Thus it remainsunclear whether lexical tone perception, especially its phonological processing, is impaired in Cantonese-speaking amusics.This study investigated the categorical perception of a continuum of lexical tone stimuli and pure tone analogues in Cantonese-speaking amusics and controls. The amusics showed reduced discrimination peak across the categorical boundary comparedto controls in lexical tone condition, suggesting impaired categorical perception; in pure tone condition, the amusics showedinferior performance on both between- and within-category discriminations, suggesting a deficit in auditory pitch processing.These findings indicate that phonological processing of tone is impaired in Cantonese-speaking amusics, despite possiblecompensation effect.