The Acquisition of the BA Construction by English-speaking Learners of Chinese

This study examined the acquisition of the BA construction by English-speaking learners of Chinese. The BA construction is a unique yet important grammar phenomenon in Chinese. Whether second language (L2) learners of Chinese are able to understand and use this construction correctly and appropriately may affect the overall success of their communication in the target language. Previous studies on the acquisition of the BA construction showed that L2 Chinese learners did better with certain types of BA sentences than with others. However, those studies are mainly descriptive in nature, without fitting themselves into the framework of any existing SLA theory. This study systematically examined L2 Chinese learners' knowledge of various linguistic properties of the BA construction within the framework of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2005; 2009), comparing the acquisition of core syntactic properties vs. properties at the interfaces of syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse. Specifically, this study examined whether L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of those properties differs in terms of the knowledge that each property requires, comparing core syntax properties with interface properties, as the IH predicts. Fifteen intermediate low and 17 intermediate high English-speaking learners of Chinese and 20 native speakers of Chinese completed three tasks: a grammaticality judgment task, a contextual acceptability preference task, and a paired grammaticality judgment task. Their responses were measured both in accuracy rates and acceptance rates. Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to compare the mean acceptance rates each group achieved across the properties and sentence types (grammatical vs. ungrammatical). Repeated measures ANOVAs were also conducted to compare the mean acceptance rates of each property across the groups. The results indicated that the native speakers consistently achieved high accuracy across properties although there was more variance with the syntax-discourse properties. Both L2 groups scored significantly higher with core syntax properties than with the interface properties. The IH was partially supported in this study, since an advantage over the core syntax properties was observed. The observed distinction provides instructional implications for the teaching of the BA construction to students of Chinese a foreign language, e.g. when presenting a construction like BA, a better and more effective way might be to distinguish the properties in terms of the knowledge they call for. Those that call for knowledge from other domains such as semantics or pragmatics other than syntax should be emphasized and more time and effort should be devoted to these properties. In practicing the BA construction, students should be provided with contexts in which this construction will be used appropriately and authentically

Possible bound state of the double heavy meson-baryon system

We calculate the two-pion exchange potential between a heavy meson and a heavy baryon. We find this potential is as strong as the one-pion exchange potential between two heavy mesons and is enough to bind $\Lambda_b-\bar B$. Though our result is sensitive to the cut-off, the value of the cut-off is in the reasonable region.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, replace the old verson which does not correspond to the published versio

Wounding triggers MIRO-1 dependent mitochondrial fragmentation that accelerates epidermal wound closure through oxidative signaling.

Organisms respond to tissue damage through the upregulation of protective responses which restore tissue structure and metabolic function. Mitochondria are key sources of intracellular oxidative metabolic signals that maintain cellular homeostasis. Here we report that tissue and cellular wounding triggers rapid and reversible mitochondrial fragmentation. Elevated mitochondrial fragmentation either in fzo-1 fusion-defective mutants or after acute drug treatment accelerates actin-based wound closure. Wounding triggered mitochondrial fragmentation is independent of the GTPase DRP-1 but acts via the mitochondrial Rho GTPase MIRO-1 and cytosolic Ca2+. The fragmented mitochondria and accelerated wound closure of fzo-1 mutants are dependent on MIRO-1 function. Genetic and transcriptomic analyzes show that enhanced mitochondrial fragmentation accelerates wound closure via the upregulation of mtROS and Cytochrome P450. Our results reveal how mitochondrial dynamics respond to cellular and tissue injury and promote tissue repair

Changes of Myogenic Reactive Oxygen Species and Interleukin-6 in Contracting Skeletal Muscle Cells

The aim of this study was to measure changes in myotube reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the production of interleukin (IL)-6 in electrically stimulated mouse C2C12 skeletal muscle cells. After five days of differentiation, myotubes were stimulated using an electrical stimulator set at 45 V at a frequency of 5 Hz, with a pulse width of 20 ms. Acute stimulations were performed for 45, 60, 75, 90, or 120 min in each dish. ROSs were detected in the extracted cells directly using a fluorescent probe. IL-6 mRNA expression in C2C12 myotubes and IL-6 concentration in C2C12 myotube supernatants were determined using real-time PCR and ELISA, respectively. Compared with control cells, ROS generation was significantly increased at 45 min after the onset of stimulation (P < 0.01) and continued to increase, reaching a maximum at 120 min. IL-6 mRNA expression and IL-6 concentration in C2C12 cells were significantly increased after 75 min (P < 0.01) and 120 min (P < 0.05) of electrical stimulation (ES) compared with the control cells. Our data show that a specific ES intensity may modulate ROS accumulation and affect IL-6 gene expression in contracting skeletal muscle cells

Optimizing Deep Transformers for Chinese-Thai Low-Resource Translation

In this paper, we study the use of deep Transformer translation model for the CCMT 2022 Chinese-Thai low-resource machine translation task. We first explore the experiment settings (including the number of BPE merge operations, dropout probability, embedding size, etc.) for the low-resource scenario with the 6-layer Transformer. Considering that increasing the number of layers also increases the regularization on new model parameters (dropout modules are also introduced when using more layers), we adopt the highest performance setting but increase the depth of the Transformer to 24 layers to obtain improved translation quality. Our work obtains the SOTA performance in the Chinese-to-Thai translation in the constrained evaluation