Annual cycle of Southeast Asia - Maritime Continent rainfall and the asymmetric monsoon transition

J. Climate, 18, 287-301.(Manuscript)In general the Bay of Bengal, Indochina Peninsula and Philippines are in the Asian summer monsoon regime while the Maritime Continent experiences a wet monsoon during boreal winter and a dry season during boreal summer. However, the complex distribution of land, sea and terrain results in significant local variations of the annual cycle. This work uses historical station rainfall data to classify the annual cycles of rainfall over land areas, the TRMM rainfall measurements to identify the monsoon regimes of the four seasons in the entire Southeast Asia, and the QuikSCAT winds to study the causes of the variations. The annual cycle is dominated largely by interactions between the complex terrain and a simple annual reversal of the surface monsoonal winds throughout all monsoon regions from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the equatorial western Pacific The semiannual cycle is comparable in magnitude to the annual cycle over parts of the equatorial landmasses, but only a very small region reflects the twice-yearly crossing of the sun. Most of the semiannual cycle appears to be due to the influence of both the summer and the winter monsoon in the western part of the Maritime Continent where the annual cycle maximum occurs in fall. Analysis of the TRMM data reveals a structure whereby the boreal summer and winter monsoon rainfall regimes intertwine across the equator and both are strongly affected by the wind-terrain interaction. In particular the boreal winter regime extends far northward along the eastern flanks of the major island groups and landmasses. A hypothesis is presented to explain the asymmetric seasonal march in which the maximum convection follows a gradual southeastward progression path from the Asian 2 summer monsoon to the Asian winter monsoon but a sudden transition in the reverse. The hypothesis is based on the redistribution of mass between land and ocean areas during spring and fall that results from different land-ocean thermal memories. This mass redistribution between the two transition seasons produces sea- level patterns leading to asymmetric wind-terrain interactions throughout the region, and a low- level divergence asymmetry in the region that promote the southward march of maximum convection during boreal fall but opposes the northward march during boreal spring.In general the Bay of Bengal, Indochina Peninsula and Philippines are in the Asian summer monsoon regime while the Maritime Continent experiences a wet monsoon during boreal winter and a dry season during boreal summer. However, the complex distribution of land, sea and terrain results in significant local variations of the annual cycle. This work uses historical station rainfall data to classify the annual cycles of rainfall over land areas, the TRMM rainfall measurements to identify the monsoon regimes of the four seasons in the entire Southeast Asia, and the QuikSCAT winds to study the causes of the variations. The annual cycle is dominated largely by interactions between the complex terrain and a simple annual reversal of the surface monsoonal winds throughout all monsoon regions from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the equatorial western Pacific The semiannual cycle is comparable in magnitude to the annual cycle over parts of the equatorial landmasses, but only a very small region reflects the twice-yearly crossing of the sun. Most of the semiannual cycle appears to be due to the influence of both the summer and the winter monsoon in the western part of the Maritime Continent where the annual cycle maximum occurs in fall. Analysis of the TRMM data reveals a structure whereby the boreal summer and winter monsoon rainfall regimes intertwine across the equator and both are strongly affected by the wind-terrain interaction. In particular the boreal winter regime extends far northward along the eastern flanks of the major island groups and landmasses. A hypothesis is presented to explain the asymmetric seasonal march in which the maximum convection follows a gradual southeastward progression path from the Asian 2 summer monsoon to the Asian winter monsoon but a sudden transition in the reverse. The hypothesis is based on the redistribution of mass between land and ocean areas during spring and fall that results from different land-ocean thermal memories. This mass redistribution between the two transition seasons produces sea- level patterns leading to asymmetric wind-terrain interactions throughout the region, and a low- level divergence asymmetry in the region that promote the southward march of maximum convection during boreal fall but opposes the northward march during boreal spring

Morphological awareness in Chinese: Unique associations of homophone awareness and lexical compounding to word reading and vocabulary knowledge in Chinese children

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Reading comprehension and its component skills in children with SLI and children with dyslexia

Poster session 1: LiteracyThe Poster Abstract Book can be viewed at: http://www.iascl2014.org/files/6014/0483/0776/Posters_Final.pdfReading comprehension involves word decoding and oral language comprehension (Hoover and Gough, 1990). Young readers with dyslexia are at risk for reading-comprehension impairment. Reading-comprehension impairment also happens in children without wordreading deficits, and about 30% of these children is language-impaired. Reading comprehension involves higher-order skills of working memory, inferencing, and comprehension monitoring (Cain & Oakhill, 2007). This study aims to examine whether Chinese children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with dyslexia demonstrate difficulties in these skills. Ninety-five eight-year-old Primary 2 children participated in this study. Using normreferenced measures, these children were diagnosed as either normal (n=42), SLI (n=28), dyslexia (N=10), or SLI-dyslexia (n=19) at the end of Primary 1. The children completed tasks examining word reading, reading comprehension, written grammar, working memory, comprehension monitoring and literal and inferential reading comprehension of texts in which word and grammar levels were controlled. Age and Ravens were used as covariates in all MANOVA and ANOVA analyses. In both word reading and reading comprehension, the normal group outperformed the three atypical groups and the SLI group scored higher than the dyslexic group. In word reading, the SLI and the dyslexia group performed better than the co-morbid group, and in reading comprehension, only the SLI group performed better than the co-morbid group. For written grammar, the normal group again performed better than the three atypical groups, and the SLI and dyslexia group outperformed the co-morbid group. For literal and inferential comprehension, the normal group performed better than the SLI and co-morbid group, and the same pattern of results was found for comprehension monitoring and working memory. The dyslexia group did not perform worse than the normal group in these higher-order skills. These results suggest different focus of reading comprehension intervention for children with SLI and children with dyslexia. (Project funded by Hong Kong RGC755110) Hoover, W. A. & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2, 127-160. Oakhill, J. V., & Cain, K. (2004). The development of comprehension skills. In T. Nunes & P. Bryant (eds). Handbook of children’s literacy, 155-180.published_or_final_versio

Developmental changes in the role of different metalinguistic awareness skills in Chinese reading acquisition from preschool to third grade

Copyright @ 2014 Wei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.National Natural Science Foundation of China and Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Cognitive skills and literacy performance of Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, and verbal working memory. A total of 90 junior secondary school students, 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological age controls, and 30 reading level controls was tested on a range of cognitive and literacy tasks. Dyslexic students were less competent than the control students in all cognitive and literacy measures. The regression analyses also showed that verbal working memory, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic knowledge were significantly associated with literacy performance. Findings underscore the importance of these cognitive skills for Chinese literacy acquisition. Overall, this study highlights the persistent difficulties of Chinese dyslexic adolescents who seem to have multiple causes for reading and spelling difficulties

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Chinese Language and Reading Abilities

This study investigated the etiology of individual differences in Chinese language and reading skills in 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years (228 pairs of monozygotic twins and 84 pairs of dizygotic twins; 166 male pairs and 146 female pairs). Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming, morphological awareness and orthographic skills, and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices. All analyses controlled for the effects of age. There were moderate to substantial genetic influences on word reading, tone awareness, phonological memory, morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming (estimates ranged from .42 to .73), while shared environment exerted moderate to strong effects on receptive vocabulary, syllable and rhyme awareness and orthographic skills (estimates ranged from .35 to .63). Results were largely unchanged when scores were adjusted for nonverbal reasoning as well as age. Findings of this study are mostly similar to those found for English, a language with very different characteristics, and suggest the universality of genetic and environmental influences across languages

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Search for New Physics with Jets and Missing Transverse Momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for new physics is presented based on an event signature of at least three jets accompanied by large missing transverse momentum, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns collected in proton--proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC. No excess of events is observed above the expected standard model backgrounds, which are all estimated from the data. Exclusion limits are presented for the constrained minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model. Cross section limits are also presented using simplified models with new particles decaying to an undetected particle and one or two jets