Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

Tone Sandhi Phenomena In Taiwan Southern Min

This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule. The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a near- or complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing direct- and indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework

Development of Lexical Tone Production in Disyllabic Words by 2- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking Children

This study investigated children\u27s development in the production of Mandarin lexical tones in familiar disyllabic words and tested the hypothesis that disyllabic tone contours with more complex fundamental frequency contours are more difficult for children to produce. Participants were forty-four 2- to 6-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and 12 mothers. Their disyllabic tone productions were elicited by picture naming and low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information while retaining the fundamental frequency contours. Three Mandarin-speaking judges listened to the filtered stimuli, and categorized the children\u27s and adult\u27s disyllabic tones. Acoustic analysis was performed on selected accurate child and adult productions and on a sample of children\u27s inaccurate productions. Judges identified adults\u27 productions as the intended tones with very high accuracy. As a group, children\u27s productions were judged significantly less correctly than adults\u27. Judged correctness increased significantly with age, but even 5- to 6-year-old children\u27s disyllabic tones were judged as less accurate overall than adults\u27. Large inter-subject variability was observed in 2- to 4-year-old children\u27s performance. Some disyllabic tones, particularly non-compatible tone combinations (i.e., tones with large transitions at the boundary between the syllables), remained difficult even for older children. When children made errors, they usually produced one of the tones correctly; error patterns suggested that they modified the first tone to be more compatible with the second tone (i.e., showed anticipatory coarticulation patterns), unlike the adult patterns which show more carry-over coarticulatory effects. When the four lexical tones were analyzed separately, significant context effects were found. Children produced the high level tone (T1) more accurately in the second than the first syllable. The rising tone (T2) was more accurately produced in compatible than non-compatible contexts. The low, dipping tone (T3) and falling tone (T4) were produced least accurately in the first syllable when the tone combination was non-compatible. In conclusion, acquisition of disyllabic Mandarin tone contour appears to be a gradual process that spans more than six years to achieve mastery. Children have more difficulty producing complex tone contours that demand rapid f0 changes, suggesting the influence of immature physiological control of laryngeal gestures on the production of lexical tone contours in continuous speech

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels

Exploring Cross-linguistic Effects and Phonetic Interactions in the Context of Bilingualism

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research

Shanghai Pudong:

This publication concerns large-scale urban area development in general, and in particular with gaining an understanding of the role played by global-local interaction in shaping the area development strategies in one particularly explosive urban project, the development of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area. The Pudong development provides an extreme example of a situation in which interaction between global and local forces took place in a location whose boundaries had been closed to the outside world for almost forty years and in a period when doors and windows were beginning to open. The research led to a concrete interpretation of the tensions developing at district level and provided an example capable of representing the complexity and dynamics of current area developments. The practical question addressed by the research was: What were the main factors responsible for the speed achieved by the Pudong development? The associated theoretical question was To what extent did the development of the Pudong New Area reflect the characteristics of a developmental state