(see also misc/specification.pdf)
The experiment implements a version of an incremental verification task in which binary truth-value judgements are collected for sentence-picture pairs,while the picture is only incrementally revealed upon subjects' request. The task helps to obtain information about the relative preferences for different readings of potentially ambiguous sentences from categorical answers.
The experiment uses this approach for detecting "scalar implicatures", in particular the enrichment of some to some but not all. In the critical trials of this experiments, subjects must judge a sentence like "The bell is connected to some of the triangles" true or false with respect to a picture, in which possible connections between bell and triangles are only partially revealed. Under a semantic reading of some, subjects would then judge the sentence true in a situation in which they can ascertain that there are at least some relevant connection, while still uncertain as to whether the bell is connected to all of the triangles. Under a pragmatically enriched reading, participants would withhold a truth-value judgement at this stage until further information is available.
browserify is used to modularize the JavaScript. Additionally, browserify allows several transforms. Therefore we can write ES6 JavaScript (the next version of JavaScript with many nice features) which then gets transpiled to ES3 JavaScript by browserify such that the code is runnable in all current browsers.
Since these are node tools, you need to have node installed. Then just run
[sudo] npm install
in the top directory to install browserify and es6ify.
Note: Before your changes to the experiment have any effect, you need to transpile the ES6 code:
node build.js # or: npm run-script build