Gradient Acceptability in Mandarin Nonword Judgment

Syllable well-formedness judgment experiments reveal that speakers exhibit gradient judgment on novel words, and the gradience has been attributed to both grammatical factors and lexical statistics (e.g., Coetzee, 2008). This study investigates gradient phonotactics stemming from the violations of four types of grammatical constraints in Mandarin Chinese: 1) principled phonotactic constraints, 2) accidental phonotactic constraints, 3) allophonic restrictions, and 4) segmental-tonal cooccurrence restrictions. A syllable well-formedness judgment experiment was conducted with native Mandarin speakers to examine how the grammatical and lexical statistics factors contribute to the variation in phonotactic acceptability judgment

Implementing the Minamata Convention on Mercury: Will China Deliver?

China has undertaken a major shift in its position on mercury as an environmental problem over the last decade and a half. It ratified the Minamata Convention (MC) in 2016 and by doing so has committed to implement the treaty objectives. This article asks: How do we explain China’s will and ability to implement its MC obligations? There is little systematic knowledge about the main factors underlying implementation of international mercury objectives in China, hence this article contributes new research on this important topic. We examine the implementation process, focusing on the coal sector and differentiate between indirect effects from other policies and direct efforts to implement obligations. We find that China has moved toward stricter regulation of mercury emissions and direct implementation of the Minamata Convention in the coal sector. However, our study shows that local implementation capacity needs improvement.Implementing the Minamata Convention on Mercury: Will China Deliver?acceptedVersio

Global health effects of future atmospheric mercury emissions

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that poses health risks to the global population. Anthropogenic mercury emissions to the atmosphere are projected to decrease in the future due to enhanced policy efforts such as the Minamata Convention, a legally-binding international treaty entered into force in 2017. Here, we report the development of a comprehensive climate-atmosphere-land-ocean-ecosystem and exposure-risk model framework for mercury and its application to project the health effects of future atmospheric emissions. Our results show that the accumulated health effects associated with mercury exposure during 2010–2050 are $19 (95% confidence interval: 4.7–54) trillion (2020 USD) realized to 2050 (3% discount rate) for the current policy scenario. Our results suggest a substantial increase in global human health cost if emission reduction actions are delayed. This comprehensive modeling approach provides a much-needed tool to help parties to evaluate the effectiveness of Hg emission controls as required by the Minamata Convention

Modeling biogenic and anthropogenic secondary organic aerosol in China

A revised Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model with updated secondary organic aerosol (SOA) yields and a more detailed description of SOA formation from isoprene oxidation was applied to study the spatial and temporal distribution of SOA in China in the entire year of 2013. Predicted organic carbon (OC), elemental carbon and volatile organic compounds agreed favorably with observations at several urban areas, although the high OC concentrations in wintertime in Beijing were under-predicted. Predicted summer SOA was generally higher (10–15 µg m⁻³) due to large contributions of isoprene (country average, 61 %), although the relative importance varies in different regions. Winter SOA was slightly lower and was mostly due to emissions of alkane and aromatic compounds (51 %). Contributions of monoterpene SOA was relatively constant (8–10 %). Overall, biogenic SOA accounted for approximately 75 % of total SOA in summer, 50–60 % in autumn and spring, and 24 % in winter. The Sichuan Basin had the highest predicted SOA concentrations in the country in all seasons, with hourly concentrations up to 50 µg m⁻³. Approximately half of the SOA in all seasons was due to the traditional equilibrium partitioning of semivolatile components followed by oligomerization, while the remaining SOA was mainly due to reactive surface uptake of isoprene epoxide (5–14 %), glyoxal (14–25 %) and methylglyoxal (23–28 %). Sensitivity analyses showed that formation of SOA from biogenic emissions was significantly enhanced due to anthropogenic emissions. Removing all anthropogenic emissions while keeping the biogenic emissions unchanged led to total SOA concentrations of less than 1 µg m⁻³, which suggests that manmade emissions facilitated biogenic SOA formation and controlling anthropogenic emissions would result in reduction of both anthropogenic and biogenic SOA