Age effects in first language attrition: speech perception by Korean-English bilinguals

This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. All materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/B2478 and at https://osf.io/G4C7Z. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.This study investigated how bilinguals’ perception of their first language (L1) differs according to age of reduced contact with L1 after immersion in a second language (L2). Twenty-one L1 Korean-L2 English bilinguals in the United States, ranging in age of reduced contact from 3 to 15 years, and 17 control participants in Korea were tested perceptually on three L1 contrasts differing in similarity to L2 contrasts. Compared to control participants, bilinguals were less accurate on L1-specific contrasts, and their accuracy was significantly correlated with age of reduced contact, an effect most pronounced for the contrast most dissimilar to L2. These findings suggest that the earlier bilinguals are extensively exposed to L2, the less likely they are to perceive L1 sounds accurately. However, this relationship is modulated by crosslinguistic similarity, and a turning point in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of phonology appears to occur at around age 12.This research was supported by funding from the Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland. The funding source was not involved in the design of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. We thank Dr. Youngkyu Kim at Ewha Womans University for his substantial support and Ms. Irene Jieun Ahn (formerly at Ewha Womans University and currently at Michigan State University) for her help during data collection in Korea. (Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland

Five Guidelines for Partition Analysis with Applications to Lecture Hall-type Theorems

Five simple guidelines are proposed to compute the generating function for the nonnegative integer solutions of a system of linear inequalities. In contrast to other approaches, the emphasis is on deriving recurrences. We show how to use the guidelines strategically to solve some nontrivial enumeration problems in the theory of partitions and compositions. This includes a strikingly different approach to lecture hall-type theorems, with new $q$-series identities arising in the process. For completeness, we prove that the guidelines suffice to find the generating function for any system of homogeneous linear inequalities with integer coefficients. The guidelines can be viewed as a simplification of MacMahon's partition analysis with ideas from matrix techiniques, Elliott reduction, and ``adding a slice''

This Is Not a Painting /Post Modernism and Painting: For the Humanity

My research intends to explore the ongoing path of contemporary painting through the lenses of architecture, literature, and techne in terms of both methodology and the filter of Eastern philosophical ideas, such as a void and relationships, as expressed in cultural history. In academics, I initially studied English Literature with passionate academic enthusiasm (I learned many poems and read multiple theses pertaining to architecture while attending classes in architecture, French literature, and German literature). As MoMA provides opportunities for studying architecture, fashion and literature, I want to explore the different ways in which certain new trends in the visual arts are now erasing the definite lines between fine art and art of daily life, painting and other mediums, Eastern and Western, and North Korea and South Korea. My trial to amalgamate all visual and aural language is inspired by my denial of the proposition “This is not a painting”, which I believe is both a preposterous and a controversial idea. The process includes the grafting of painting on different characters. After Clement Greenberg’s dogma era, painting was no longer a matter of trends or story subject matter. The form of painting changes for each generation; however, the content still stresses humanity. For example, Rene Magritte drew a pipe and captioned it, “This is not a pipe”. There are two seminal ideas here in Rene Magritte’s image of a pipe. The first refers to the relationship between painting and language. The second refers to the relationship between painting and artistic representation. Painting starts from language, but it then evolves to become a visual expression. Thus, a painting can become a mirror image interpreted by its painter’s eyes and ideas, not an actual representation of reality. An expansion of the visual language of contemporary painting’ is not a problem of image content, but rather it is a problem emanating from “a way of seeing”, “a way of thinking”, and the lens or filter that is employed to “interpret” that image thusly. As Magritte believed, the linguistic assumption that one paints to expand the territory of pictorial language, but then asserts that this image is not a painting, is an attempt to engender different things by adding, dividing, multiplying, and subtracting other visual idioms, thereby stressing the correlation between other visual language and the act of painting. However, that change is a form of painting after all. This view is meaningful in that it is an attempt to discover the possibility of integrating painting with other mediums to rediscover the indispensable, eternal value of painting through a contradictory process wherein the denial of a preposition after all turns new attention to the affirmation of that same preposition. What has changed in this painting is not the content or theme, but its form. The mission of post-modern painting was indeed to change its form. Painting is not simply an expression of one-sided thought and emotion completed by individual artists. Viewers are expected to see painting from integration rather than judging that painting’s specificity which has been shattered in contemporary art. Paradoxically, through the processes of hybridizing, different stage setting, I suggest that the essence of painting is the revival of humanity. The zeitgeist (spirit of the times) yearns for a Renaissance (rebirth). It is a Re-Renaissance that is needed for especially for post-modern people who crave humanity. This paper is of significance in that it is an exploration of painting’s identity and new orientation. That is, it is intended to explore the nature and value of painting through a comparative, amalgamative study into other forms of visual and aural language. This is also to consider what new perspectives can be employed to figure out painting’s peculiarity as a medium in terms of cultural history, and how painting assumes the role of a precursor couched in different visual languages in terms of form

Fundamental properties of borate-modified oriented strandboard manufactured from southern wood species

In the United States, damages to buildings from termites and decay fungi cost billions of dollars annually. As a result, there is an urgent need for building construction that will withstand the ravages of these biological pathogens. Chemical modification of building products is one of the techniques for developing durable wood-based construction. This study was conducted to examine the effects of powder zinc borate (ZB) and calcium borate (CB) on resin gel time, strength, swelling, leaching, termite, decay, and mold resistance properties of oriented strandboard (OSB). It was found that gel time of phenol formaldehyde (PF) resin decreased with increased amount of ZB, indicating interaction between the borate and the resin. The reduced gel time was partially recovered by using polyethylene glycol (PEG) in combination with ZB. Although panel stiffness was not affected by borate up to a 3.5 percent boric acid equivalent (BAE) level, ZB and CB showed a negative effect on the bending and internal bond (IB) strength. Thickness swelling (TS) of treated panels after 24-hour water soaking increased with borate level. ZB-treated OSB displayed less TS than CB-treated OSB at an equivalent BAE level. CB with a larger particle size caused significant TS. However, the chemical with a smaller particle size helped bring TS to a stable and acceptable level. A certain portion of borate leached out from OSB samples under the water-soaking conditions. The leaching rate varied with wood species, borate types, and amount. The use of borate with a smaller particle size helped reduce the leaching rate. The relationship between assayed BAE and leaching time followed a decaying exponential function for ZB and a decaying power function for CB. Laboratory termite tests showed that wood weight loss decreased and termite mortality increased with the increased BAE level. At the1% BAE or above, there was little damage on wood samples. There were significant correlations among termite mortality, weight loss, and visual damage ratings. Both borate chemicals provided an excellent decay and mold resistance for OSB. The information on various properties of borate-modified OSB is of significant value for developing durable structural panels from southern wood species

LOOKING INTO BILINGUALISM THROUGH THE HERITAGE SPEAKER'S MIND

Due to their unique profile as childhood bilinguals whose first language (L1) became weaker than their second language (L2), heritage speakers can shed light on three key issues in bilingualism - timing, input, and cross-linguistic interaction. The heritage speakers of focus in this dissertation are Korean second generation immigrants mainly exposed to their heritage language (HL) when young but who became more dominant in their L2 later in life. The ability of Korean heritage speakers in both their HL (Korean) and L2 (English), including speech perception, translation priming, and grammatical intuition were examined. Six psycholinguistic tasks, a bilingual experience questionnaire, and Korean and English proficiency tests were administered. Data were collected from 48 Korean heritage speakers, 36 English speakers learning Korean as adults and 36 Korean speakers learning English as adults. The two L2-learner comparison groups also served as native speaker controls for their respective native languages. The Korean heritage speakers raised in an English-speaking country, despite having been exposed to Korean first and throughout their lives, exhibited significant weaknesses in their Korean competence while exhibiting (near-)native-like competence in English. It is thus argued that the input-dominance switch that occurred before the critical period ended caused a dramatic reorganization of early/first established linguistic representation, which challenges some previous views on the implasticity of human language representation (e.g., Pallier et al, 1997). When compared to adult L2 learners of Korean, heritage speakers exhibited a slight advantage in speech perception and translation priming while showing no advantage in the grammaticality judgment of locative alternation. It is therefore suggested here that heritage speakers may have an advantage over adult L2 learners with early-acquired linguistic features and with implicit processing capacity. Another notable finding is that Korean heritage speakers showed less-than-nativelike performance in locative alternation in both Korean and English, a finding that highlights cross-linguistic interaction in bilingualism. The standard practice of comparing bilinguals to monolingual competence in SLA studies is thus called into question. Finally, although individual differences among the heritage participants in the current study were best predicted by language aptitude and amount of instruction, no conclusive claim regarding the role of language aptitude or instruction in early bilingualism is proposed here because it is unclear whether such effects influenced the childhood bilingual development or re-learning during adulthood of the current heritage participants. In short, timing, input, and cross-linguistic interaction all seem to contribute significantly to the development of bilingual competence. The heritage speakers examined in this dissertation turned out to be an excellent testing ground for all three of these ingredients of language acquisition

DNA Steganalysis Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have facilitated the use of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as a novel covert channels in steganography. There are various methods that exist in other domains to detect hidden messages in conventional covert channels. However, they have not been applied to DNA steganography. The current most common detection approaches, namely frequency analysis-based methods, often overlook important signals when directly applied to DNA steganography because those methods depend on the distribution of the number of sequence characters. To address this limitation, we propose a general sequence learning-based DNA steganalysis framework. The proposed approach learns the intrinsic distribution of coding and non-coding sequences and detects hidden messages by exploiting distribution variations after hiding these messages. Using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs), our framework identifies the distribution variations by using the classification score to predict whether a sequence is to be a coding or non-coding sequence. We compare our proposed method to various existing methods and biological sequence analysis methods implemented on top of our framework. According to our experimental results, our approach delivers a robust detection performance compared to other tools

Multichannel Relay assisted NOMA-ALOHA with Reinforcement Learning based Random Access

© 2023, IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This is the accepted manuscript version of a conference paper which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1109/VTC2023-Spring57618.2023.10200766We investigate multichannel relay assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in slotted ALOHA systems, where each user randomly accesses one of different channel slots and different transmit power for uplink transmissions over two-hop links, to and from the relay. By using multi-agent reinforcement learning, we propose greedy and non-greedy random access methods so that each user can learn its best strategies of random access over multiple relay slots. Random collisions and fading over the relay slots are both considered. The behaviors of relay-aided NOMA-ALOHA strategies are evaluated with the simulation. It is shown that the greedy method outperforms the non-greedy method in terms of average success rate. For deployment of relay, the greedy method benefits in improving transmission reliability under the symmetric relay channels (between the two-hop links) compared to asymmetric channels. Thus, it is interpreted that the proposed greedy method is more promising to the NOMA-ALOHA systems under a symmetric multichannel relay