Breathy phonation refers to the laryngeal setting where the vocal folds are less tense and make less contact than in “modal” phonation, which consequently leads to continuous leaking of voiceless... Show moreBreathy phonation refers to the laryngeal setting where the vocal folds are less tense and make less contact than in “modal” phonation, which consequently leads to continuous leaking of voiceless airflow, giving rise to the perception of breathiness in a speech sound. In Austronesian languages, contrastive breathy segments are very rare. For the Austronesian languages of Island Southeast Asia, only one language has been reported to have phonemically breathy vowels: Kedang, a language spoken on Lembata island, in eastern Indonesia. In this paper, we revisit the earlier analysis that in Kedang, breathiness distinguishes phonemic “breathy” from “modal” vowels. Presenting evidence of distributional, acoustic, and etymological nature, we argue that the so-called breathy onsetless vowels do not appear to be similar to breathy vowels described in the literature. Their “breathy” nature may have a historical source in initial glottal consonants that were lost, but is currently used as a phonetic strategy that is intended to enhance the perceptual contrast between syllables with a phonemic glottal onset versus onsetless syllables. We also suggest that the glottal stop in Kedang is phonemic in all positions and indicatea possible historical trajectory for its development. Show less
Background: Mobile technology may help to better understand the adherence to treatment. MASK-rhinitis (Mobile Airways Sentinel NetworK for allergic rhinitis) is a patient-centred ICT system. A... Show moreBackground: Mobile technology may help to better understand the adherence to treatment. MASK-rhinitis (Mobile Airways Sentinel NetworK for allergic rhinitis) is a patient-centred ICT system. A mobile phone app (the Allergy Diary) central to MASK is available in 22 countries.Objectives: To assess the adherence to treatment in allergic rhinitis patients using the Allergy Diary App.Methods: An observational cross-sectional study was carried out on all users who filled in the Allergy Diary from 1 January 2016 to 1 August 2017. Secondary adherence was assessed by using the modified Medication Possession Ratio (MPR) and the Proportion of days covered (PDC) approach.Results: A total of 12143 users were registered. A total of 6949 users reported at least one VAS data recording. Among them, 1887 users reported >= 7 VAS data. About 1195 subjects were included in the analysis of adherence. One hundred and thirty-six (11.28%) users were adherent (MPR >= 70% and PDC <= 1.25), 51 (4.23%) were partly adherent (MPR >= 70% and PDC = 1.50) and 176 (14.60%) were switchers. On the other hand, 832 (69.05%) users were non-adherent to medications (MPR <70%). Of those, the largest group was non-adherent to medications and the time interval was increased in 442 (36.68%) users.Conclusion and clinical relevance: Adherence to treatment is low. The relative efficacy of continuous vs on-demand treatment for allergic rhinitis symptoms is still a matter of debate. This study shows an approach for measuring retrospective adherence based on a mobile app. This also represents a novel approach for analysing medication-taking behaviour in a real-world setting. Show less
Allergic Rhinitis and its Impact on Asthma (ARIA) has evolved from a guideline by using the best approach to integrated care pathways using mobile technology in patients with allergic rhinitis (AR)... Show moreAllergic Rhinitis and its Impact on Asthma (ARIA) has evolved from a guideline by using the best approach to integrated care pathways using mobile technology in patients with allergic rhinitis (AR) and asthma multimorbidity. The proposed next phase of ARIA is change management, with the aim of providing an active and healthy life to patients with rhinitis and to those with asthma multimorbidity across the lifecycle irrespective of their sex or socioeconomic status to reduce health and social inequities incurred by the disease. ARIA has followed the 8-step model of Kotter to assess and implement the effect of rhinitis on asthma multimorbidity and to propose multimorbid guidelines. A second change management strategy is proposed by ARIA Phase 4 to increase self-medication and shared decision making in rhinitis and asthma multimorbidity. An innovation of ARIA has been the development and validation of information technology evidence-based tools (Mobile Airways Sentinel Network [MASK]) that can inform patient decisions on the basis of a self-care plan proposed by the health care professional. Show less
Phonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many... Show morePhonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many ETEs, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. Using an auditory lexical decision experiment and Generalised Additive Modelling, the present study investigates how cross-linguistic tonal similarity interacts with language of operation and how the switching of language across blocks influences SC-JM bilinguals’ auditory lexical processing of ETEs. Bilinguals showed a language dominance effect, indicating that ETEs are specified with separated word-form representations. Compared with SC tonal monolinguals, bilinguals showed a discontinuous bilingual auditory lexical advantage, instead of a classical bilingual lexical disadvantage. The dynamic role of cross-linguistic tonal similarity in auditory word processing is discussed in light of the bilinguals’ attentional shift with the change of language mode at the pre-lexical and lexical stages. Show less
The main purpose of this article is to reveal the effect of self-archiving on the citation impact of preprints in Information Science & Library Science (LIS). The arXiv and WoS database are... Show moreThe main purpose of this article is to reveal the effect of self-archiving on the citation impact of preprints in Information Science & Library Science (LIS). The arXiv and WoS database are used and all citations from WoS are collected to address two key questions—one is the share of papers published in the core LIS journals that also deposited in arXiv and time lags in publication process, the other is the differences in aging characteristics and citation impact of journal articles deposited in arXiv compared to those not deposited—through statistical and bibliometric analysis. The results show that the proportion of journal articles deposited in arXiv is low but there is an overall increasing trend, nearly 80% of all arXiv papers are preprints and authors are more likely to post the paper to arXiv when it is received or accepted by a journal, the preprints enjoy a boost in early citations and the citation advantage decrease with the increasing author productivity, the citations to arXiv version papers indicate an OA effect of arXiv. Show less
The Second National Enterprise Innovation Survey was conducted in China in 2017, targeting industry, construction and service sectors. This survey used to a large extent the Oslo Manual as... Show moreThe Second National Enterprise Innovation Survey was conducted in China in 2017, targeting industry, construction and service sectors. This survey used to a large extent the Oslo Manual as reference in terms of norms and standards and drew on lessons and experiences from innovation survey practices in EU countries. However, there were additional contents to it, such as, survey of entrepreneurial groups. According to the results of the 2017 survey, approximately 40% of the enterprises surveyed had innovation activity and around 8% of them achieved 4 kinds of innovation; the innovation success rate of the manufacturing industry was relatively high and the innovation activeness of large-sized enterprises was the highest; cooperative innovation was conducive to enhancing market competitiveness; insufficient cognition of innovation, relatively high costs of innovation and lack of elements for innovation were believed to be the major obstacles to corporate innovation; and finally, the outcome of implementation of innovation policies was widely approved among the entrepreneurial groups. Show less
To produce a word, speakers need to retrieve the lexico-syntactic representation of the word and encode the phonological form for articulation. It is not precisely known yet if a word's syntactic... Show moreTo produce a word, speakers need to retrieve the lexico-syntactic representation of the word and encode the phonological form for articulation. It is not precisely known yet if a word's syntactic features (e.g., number, gender, etc.) are automatically activated and selected in bare noun production. Cubelli, Lotto, Paolieri, Girelli, and Job (2005) proposed that only in languages that have a complex morphological structure (e.g., Italian), the selection of grammatical gender is required. In languages with a relatively simpler morphological structure, the selection of grammatical gender is by-passed. Here, we investigated this issue further by employing a language with an extremely simple morphological structure, i.e., Mandarin Chinese. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, we manipulated the congruency of the lexico-syntactic classifier feature (comparable to grammatical gender) between the target picture and the superimposed distractor word. We measured participants' naming latencies and their electroencephalogram (EEG). As a result, relative to the classifier-congruent condition, classifier incongruency elicited a stronger N400 effect in the ERP analyses, suggesting the automatic activation of lexico-syntactic features in bare noun production. However, classifier congruency did not affect naming latencies, suggesting that the lexico-syntactic feature is not selected in bare noun naming when it is irrelevant for production. Show less
The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure... Show moreThe present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi automatic way In the first stage, a program provides suggestions for the phonetician to decide the lexical tonal variants for the recordings of each word, based on the result of a functional k-means partitioning algorithm and tonal information from an available pronunciation dictionary of a related Chinese dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. The second stage iterates a functional version of k-means partitioning with silhouette-based criteria to abstract an optimal number of tonal patterns from the whole corpus, which also allows the phoneticians to adjust the results of the automatic procedure in a controlled way and so redo partitioning for a subset of clusters.The procedure yielded eleven disyllabic tonal patterns for Jinan Mandarin, representing the tonal system used by contemporary Jinan Mandarin speakers from a wide range of age groups. The procedure used in this paper is different from previous linguistic descriptions which were based on more elderly speakers' pronunciations . This method incorporates phoneticians' linguistic knowledge and preliminary linguistic resources into the procedure of partitioning. It can improve the efficiency and objectivity in the investigation of lexical tonal pattern categories when building pronunciation dictionaries for underresourced languages. Show less
This study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and... Show moreThis study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and neural responses of Dutch-Cantonese (DC) bilinguals in a color-object picture naming task. Specifically, we investigated whether DC bilinguals exhibit the phonemic processing strategy, evident in monolingual Dutch speakers, during planning of their Cantonese speech production. Participants named the color of colored line-drawings in Cantonese faster when color and object matched in the first segment than when they were mismatched (e.g., , /laam4/ /lok3to4/, "blue camel;" , /hung4/ /lok3to4/, "red camel"). This is in contrast to previous studies in Sinitic languages that did not reveal such phoneme-only facilitation. Phonemic overlap also modulated the event-related potentials (ERPs) in the 125-175, 200-300, and 300-400 ms time windows, suggesting earlier ERP modulations than in previous studies with monolingual Sinitic speakers or unbalanced Sinitic-Germanic bilinguals. Conjointly, our results suggest that, while the syllable may be considered the primary unit of phonological encoding in Sinitic languages, the phoneme can serve as the primary unit of phonological encoding, both behaviorally and neurally, for DC bilinguals. The presence/absence of a segment onset effect in Sinitic languages may be related to the proficiency in the Germanic language of bilinguals. Show less
The blocked cyclic naming paradigm has been increasingly employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying spoken word production. Semantic homogeneity typically elicits longer naming latencies... Show moreThe blocked cyclic naming paradigm has been increasingly employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying spoken word production. Semantic homogeneity typically elicits longer naming latencies than heterogeneity; however, it is debated whether competitive lexical selection or incremental learning underlies this effect. The current study manipulated both semantic and phonological homogeneity and used behavioural and electrophysiological measurements to provide evidence that can distinguish between the two accounts. Results show that naming latencies are longer in semantically homogeneous blocks, but shorter in phonologically homogeneous blocks, relative to heterogeneity. The semantic factor significantly modulates electrophysiological waveforms from 200 ms and the phonological factor from 350 ms after picture presentation. A positive component was demonstrated in both manipulations, possibly reflecting a task-related top-down bias in performing blocked cyclic naming. These results provide novel insights into the neural correlates of blocked cyclic naming and further contribute to the understanding of spoken word production. Show less
