Mandarin morphosyntax development in bilingual Mandarin-English children with and Without SLI

textOver the past decade, there have been diverse theoretical perspectives and increasing empirical literature on bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI), some of which highlighted the complex nature of accurately diagnosing SLI in bilingual populations. The goal of the current study is to enhance our understanding of morphosyntax development in an understudied bilingual population - Mandarin-English children who are growing up in an L2-dominant environment (English) in the United States. The study included a total of 55 bilingual Mandarin-English children between the ages of four and seven years, including 53 typically developing (TD) children and 2 children diagnosed with SLI. Using a newly developed screening test - the Bilingual English-Mandarin Oral Screener (BEMOS), we compared Mandarin performance in both TD and SLI children on 7 morphosyntax tasks which respectively measure passive -bei, possessive -de, prepositional phrases, noun classifiers, quantifier and scope, aspects (imperfective “-zai” and perfective “-le”), and sentence repetition. Our analysis of TD bilingual children revealed a trend towards a significant age effect in the total score and a near-significant effect in the preposition and the aspect sub-sections of the screener. When age was considered, perceived Mandarin proficiency by parents was associated with TD bilingual children’s performance. All students performed poorly on the classifier section, but our error analysis showed a predominant response pattern of imitation, suggesting bilingual children have growing sensitivity and are attentive to semantic similarity of nouns. Overgeneralized use of the general classifier “ge” was also observed in the errors. Both children with SLI scored lower overall compared to their age- and gender-matched TD peers, especially in the classifier and quantifier & scope sections. Reliable clinical markers were not identified due to the two SLI children’s distinct performance. Clinical implications and future research needs were also discussed.Communication Sciences and Disorder

Particle-modified Surface Plasmon Resonance Biosensor

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors have attracted great attention in scientific research in the past three decades. Extensive studies on the immobilisation of biorecognition elements have been conducted in pursuit of higher sensitivity, but trialled formats have focussed on a thin layer modification next to the plasmon film, which usually requires in situ derivatization. This thesis investigates an ‘off-chip’ immobilisation strategy for SPR biosensing using silica particles and considers the implications of a particle-modified evanescent field on the signal amplitude and kinetics, for an exemplar affinity binding between immobilised IgG and its anti-IgG complement. Submicron silica particles were synthesized as carriers for the bio-recognition elements. They were then immobilised to form a sub-monolayer on the gold film of an SPR biosensor using two methods: thiolsilane coupling and physical adsorption aided by mechanical pressure. The bio-sensitivity towards an antigen/antibody interaction was lower than an SPR biosensor with an alkanethiolate SAM due to the difference in ligand capacity and position in the evanescent field. The binding kinetics of antigen/antibody pair was found to follow the Langmuir model closely in a continuous flow configuration but was heavily limited by the mass transport from the bulk to the sensor surface in a stop-flow configuration. A packed channel configuration was designed with larger gel particles as ligand carriers, packed on top of a gold film to create a column-modified SPR biosensor. This sensor has comparable bio-sensitivity to the previous sub-monolayer particle-modified systems, but the binding and dissociation of the analyte was heavily dependent on mass transport and binding equilibria across the column. A bi-directional diffusion mechanism was proposed based on a two-compartment mass transport model and the expanded model fitted well with the experimental data. The column-modified sensor was also studied by SPR imaging and analyte band formation was observed and analysed. Using the lateral resolution, a multiplexing particle column configuration was explored, and its potential in distinguishing a multicomponent analyte.Agency for Science Technology and Research, Singapor

Proof of the deadlock-freeness of ALD routing algorithm

This is the appendix to the paper Load-Balanced Adaptive Routing for Torus Networks to provide a detailed, formal proof of the deadlock-freeness of the routing algorithm proposed in the paper. The paper is submitted to Electronics Letters, and the abstract of which is as follows: A new routing algorithm for torus interconnection networks to achieve high throughput on various traffic patterns, Adaptive Load-balanced routing with cycle Detection (ALD), is presented. Instead of the -channels scheme adopted in a few recently proposed algorithms of the same category, a cycle detection scheme is employed in ALD to handle deadlock, which leads to higher routing adaptability. Simulation results demonstrate that ALD achieves higher throughput than the recently proposed algorithms on both benign and adversarial traffic patterns

Trajectory Design of Laser-Powered Multi-Drone Enabled Data Collection System for Smart Cities

This paper considers a multi-drone enabled data collection system for smart cities, where there are two kinds of drones, i.e., Low Altitude Platforms (LAPs) and a High Altitude Platform (HAP). In the proposed system, the LAPs perform data collection tasks for smart cities and the solar-powered HAP provides energy to the LAPs using wireless laser beams. We aim to minimize the total laser charging energy of the HAP, by jointly optimizing the LAPs’ trajectory and the laser charging duration for each LAP, subject to the energy capacity constraints of the LAPs. This problem is formulated as a mixed-integer and non-convex Drones Traveling Problem (DTP), which is a combinatorial optimization problem and NP-hard. We propose an efficient and novel search algorithm named DronesTraveling Algorithm (DTA) to obtain a near-optimal solution. Simulation results show that DTA can deal with the large scale DTP (i.e., more than 400 data collection points) efficiently. Moreover, the DTA only uses 5 iterations to obtain the nearoptimal solution whereas the normal Genetic Algorithm needs nearly 10000 iterations and still fails to obtain an acceptable solution

Analysis on the Materials Used in Weaving Jewelry Design

The present study discusses the use of materials in the weaving jewelry, weaving jewelry is a type of jewelry that has a structure or texture similar to the textiles works. Although the practice of weaving jewelry is evident, there are many styles of weaving jewelry around the world, many researches talk about the designs, methods or structures of the weaving jewelries but few comprehensive overview of the materials involved. This study is a qualitative research method, bibliographical and scientific literature review were carried out as well as consulting collections of artists and designers, currently working with jewelry. This study takes the attempt of weaving materials in jewelry design as the theme, talking about how to make weaving materials unique and beautiful

Sensor Coverage Strategy in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper mainly describes studies hydrophone placement strategy in a complex underwater environment model to compute a set of "good" locations where data sampling will be most effective. Throughout this paper it is assumed that a 3-D underwater topographic map of a workspace is given as input.Since the negative gradient direction is the fastest descent direction, we fit a complex underwater terrain to a differentiable function and find the minimum value of the function to determine the low-lying area of the underwater terrain.The hydrophone placement strategy relies on gradient direction algorithm that solves a problem of maximize underwater coverage: Find the maximize coverage set of hydrophone inside a 3-D workspace. After finding the maximize underwater coverage set, to better take into account the optimal solution to the problem of data sampling, the finite VC-dimension algorithm computes a set of hydrophone that satisfies hydroacoustic signal energy loss constraints. We use the principle of the maximize splitting subset of the coverage set and the ”dual” set of the coverage covering set, so as to find the hitting set, and finally find the suboptimal set (i.e., the sensor suboptimal coverage set).Compared with the random deployment algorithm, although the computed set of hydrophone is not guaranteed to have minimum size, the algorithm does compute with high network coverage quality

XPS Characterization of Friedel-Crafts Cross-Linked Polystyrene

The combination of a difunctional alkylating agent, either hydroxymethylbenzyl chloride or α,α′-dichloroxylene with polystyrene or high-impact polystyrene together with a Friedel-Crafts catalyst, 2-ethylhexyldiphenylphosphate, and an amine to react with hydrogen chloride has been studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results confirm what had been suggested from previous investigations using thermogravimetric analysis; cross-linking of the polymer occurs as the temperature is raised and the alcohol-containing alkylating agent gives a greater amount of cross-linking than does the dichloro compound