[In Press] How bidialectalism affects non-native speech acquisition : evidence from Shanghai and Mandarin Chinese

The current study examines how bidialectalism influences non-native speech production. We compared monodialectal Mandarin Chinese with bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin Chinese speakers in terms of their ability to produce easy and difficult American English vowels. The results showed a general advantage for the bidialectal group compared with the monodialectal group in the production of the vowel formants and duration of the easy English vowels [i] and [u]. However, for the English vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ] known to be difficult for Chinese learners of English, both groups experienced the same challenges in terms of accurately producing the formants of the target vowels. Nevertheless, the bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin speakers were still better than the monodialectal Mandarin speakers in the durational aspect of the two difficult English vowels. The results are explained by the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model and suggest that the bidialectal advantage in non-native speech acquisition is subject to the modulation of cross-linguistic difficulty of the target speech sounds

Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials

Music and speech both communicate emotional meanings in addition to their domain-specific contents. But it is not clear whether and how the two kinds of emotional meanings are linked. The present study is focused on exploring the emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody. The stimuli were isolated instrument sounds and emotional speech prosody categorized by listeners into anger, happiness and sadness, respectively. We first analyzed the timbral features of the stimuli, which showed that relations between the three emotions were relatively consistent in those features for speech and music. The results further echo the size-code hypothesis in which different sound timbre indicates different body size projections. Then we conducted an ERP experiment using a priming paradigm with isolated instrument sounds as primes and emotional speech prosody as targets. The results showed that emotionally incongruent instrument-speech pairs triggered a larger N400 response than emotionally congruent pairs. Taken together, this is the first study to provide evidence that the timbre of simple and isolated musical instrument sounds can convey emotion in a way similar to emotional speech prosody

Highly Efficient Extraction of Cellular Nucleic Acid Associated Proteins in Vitro with Magnetic Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes

Nucleic acid associated proteins (NAaP) play the essential roles in gene regulation and protein expression. The global analysis of cellular NAaP would give a broad insight to understand the interaction between nucleic acids and the associated proteins, such as the important proteinous regulation factors on nucleic acids. Proteomic analysis presents a novel strategy to investigate a group of proteins. However, the large scale analysis of NAaP is yet impossible due to the lack of approaches to harvest target protein groups with a high efficiency. Herein, a simple and efficient method was developed to collect cellular NAaP using magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes based on the strong interaction between carbon nanotubes and nucleic acids along with corresponding associated proteins. We found that the magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes demonstrated a nearly 100% extraction efficiency for intracellular nucleic acids from cells in vitro. Importantly, the proteins associated on nucleic acids could be highly efficiently harvested using magnetic oxidized carbon nanotubes due to the binding of NAaP on nucleic acids. 1594 groups of nuclear NAaP and 2595 groups of cellular NAaP were extracted and identified from about 1 000 000 cells, and 803 groups of NAaP were analyzed with only about 10 000 cells, showing a promising performance for the proteomic analysis of NAaP from minute cellular samples. This highly efficient extraction strategy for NAaP is a simple approach to identify cellular nucleic acid associated proteome, and we believed this strategy could be further applied in systems biology to understand the gene expression and regulation