The Influence of Orthographic Experiences on the Development of Functional Phonological Unit in Spoken Word Production

The current dissertation project examined the influence of orthographic experiences on the development of the functional phonological unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Functional phonological unit refers to the first selectable phonological unit after lexical selection in the planning of spoken word production. Previous research has shown that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge restructures literate speakers’ phonological representation and in particular, the acquisition of alphabetic orthographic knowledge improves children’s phonological awareness at the phonemic level. However, few studies have investigated the influence of orthographic experiences on phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production. The goal of this dissertation is to fill this gap. Four experiments were carried out to conduct the investigation. Participants consisted of native Mandarin speakers from four age groups with different orthographic experiences, including 1) Grade 1 children, who were comparatively more exposed to alphabetic Pinyin and had very limited Chinese character knowledge, 2) Grade 2 and Grade 4 children, who had better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and 3) adult readers, who had the highest level of character knowledge and the most exposure to characters. Experiment 1 investigated whether the onset served as the functional phonological unit in producing monosyllables; Experiment 2 investigated whether the role of the onset in phonological retrieval and encoding was sustained when producing disyllabic words; Experiment 3 examined the role of the syllable segment (i.e., a syllable whose tone is indeterminate or an atonal syllable) in producing disyllabic words; Experiment 4 examined the role of the tonal syllable (i.e., tonal information is also included) in producing disyllabic words. Results showed that only Grade 1 children selected the onset as the functional phonological unit regardless of the word length during spoken word production and that additionally, they might process the rime segment and tone as a cohesive unit. By contrast, Grade 4 children and adults selected the syllable segment as the functional phonological unit. Grade 2 children were in their transitional stage of development, and they selected tonal syllable as the functional phonological unit. The different orthographic experiences of the four groups might contribute to the above differences. The current dissertation has important theoretical and pedagogical implications. The aforementioned findings help us better understand the mechanism of phonological processing, and as a result, may help educators develop more efficient pedagogical approaches to improve children’s phonological processing ability

Scalable and Safe Multi-Agent Motion Planning with Nonlinear Dynamics and Bounded Disturbances

We present a scalable and effective multi-agent safe motion planner that enables a group of agents to move to their desired locations while avoiding collisions with obstacles and other agents, with the presence of rich obstacles, high-dimensional, nonlinear, nonholonomic dynamics, actuation limits, and disturbances. We address this problem by finding a piecewise linear path for each agent such that the actual trajectories following these paths are guaranteed to satisfy the reach-and-avoid requirement. We show that the spatial tracking error of the actual trajectories of the controlled agents can be pre-computed for any qualified path that considers the minimum duration of each path segment due to actuation limits. Using these bounds, we find a collision-free path for each agent by solving Mixed Integer-Linear Programs and coordinate agents by using the priority-based search. We demonstrate our method by benchmarking in 2D and 3D scenarios with ground vehicles and quadrotors, respectively, and show improvements over the solving time and the solution quality compared to two state-of-the-art multi-agent motion planners.Comment: Accepted at AAAI2021. 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Evaluation of genetic susceptibility of common variants in CACNA1D with schizophrenia in Han Chinese

The heritability of schizophrenia (SCZ) has been estimated to be as high as 80%, suggesting that genetic factors may play an important role in the etiology of SCZ. Cav1.2 encoded by CACNA1C and Cav1.3 encoded by CACNA1D are dominant calcium channel-forming subunits of L-type Voltage-dependent Ca(2+) channels, expressed in many types of neurons. The CACNA1C has been consistently found to be a risk gene for SCZ, but it is unknown for CACNA1D. To investigate the association of CACNA1D with SCZ, we designed a two-stage case-control study, including a testing set with 1117 cases and 1815 controls and a validation set with 1430 cases and 4295 controls in Han Chinese. A total of selected 97 tag single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in CACNA1D were genotyped, and single-SNP association, imputation analysis and gender-specific association analyses were performed in the two independent datasets. None was found to associate with SCZ. Further genotype and haplotype association analyses indicated a similar pattern in the two-stage study. Our findings suggested CACNA1D might not be a risk gene for SCZ in Han Chinese population, which add to the current state of knowledge regarding the susceptibility of CACNA1D to SCZ

The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud

Funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming experiments were conducted in which the targets were always written characters. When logographic characters served as the primes (Experiment 1), syllable segmental and tonal information appeared to be represented and encoded as an integral unit which in turn facilitated target character naming. When Pinyin served as the primes (Experiment 2), the explicit phonetic representation facilitated encoding of both segmental and suprasegmental information, but with later access to suprasegmental information. In addition, Chinese speakers were faster to name characters than Pinyin in a simple naming task (Experiment 3), suggesting that Pinyin may be read via a phonological assembly route, whereas characters may be read via a lexical route. Taken together, our findings point to the need to consider the contributions of both segmental and suprasegmental information and the time course in the well-established models for reading aloud, as well as the cognitive mechanisms underlying the reading aloud of logographic characters versus alphabetic Pinyin script

a practical tool to implement hospital-based syndromic surveillance: SCM

Background: syndromic surveillance has been widely used for the early warning of infectious disease outbreaks, especially in mass gatherings, but the collection of electronic data on symptoms in hospitals is one of the fundamental challenges that must be overcome during operating a syndromic surveillance system. The objective of our study is to describe and evaluate the implementation of a symptom-clicking-module (SCM) as a part of the enhanced hospital-based syndromic surveillance during the 41st World Exposition in Shanghai, China, 2010.Methods: the SCM, including 25 targeted symptoms, was embedded in the sentinels’ Hospital Information Systems (HIS). The clinicians used SCM to record these information of all the visiting patients, and data were collated and transmitted automatically in daily batches. The symptoms were categorized into seven targeted syndromes using pre-defined criteria, and statistical algorithms were applied to detect temporal aberrations in the data series.Results: SCM was deployed successfully in each sentinel hospital and was operated during the 184-day surveillance period. A total of 1,730,797 patient encounters were recorded by SCM, and 6.1 % (105,352 visits) met the criteria of the seven targeted syndromes. Acute respiratory and gastrointestinal syndromes were reported most frequently, accounted for 92.1 % of reports in all syndromes, and the aggregated time-series presented an obvious day-of-week variation over the study period. In total, 191 aberration signals were triggered, and none of them were identified as outbreaks after verification and field investigation.Conclusions: SCM has acted as a practical tool for recording symptoms in the hospital-based enhanced syndromic surveillance system during the 41st World Exposition in Shanghai, in the context of without a preexisting electronic tool to collect syndromic data in the HIS of the sentinel hospitals

The VMC survey - XI : Radial Stellar Population Gradients in the Galactic Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae

Copyright American Astronomical SocietyWe present a deep near-infrared color-magnitude diagram of the Galactic globular cluster 47 Tucanae, obtained with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) as part of the VISTA near-infrared Y, J, Ks survey of the Magellanic System (VMC). The cluster stars comprising both the subgiant and red giant branches exhibit apparent, continuous variations in color-magnitude space as a function of radius. Subgiant branch stars at larger radii are systematically brighter than their counterparts closer to the cluster core; similarly, red-giant-branch stars in the cluster's periphery are bluer than their more centrally located cousins. The observations can very well be described by adopting an age spread of ~0.5 Gyr as well as radial gradients in both the cluster's helium abundance (Y) and metallicity (Z), which change gradually from (Y = 0.28, Z = 0.005) in the cluster core to (Y = 0.25, Z = 0.003) in its periphery. We conclude that the cluster's inner regions host a significant fraction of second-generation stars, which decreases with increasing radius; the stellar population in the 47 Tuc periphery is well approximated by a simple stellar population.Peer reviewe