This study investigated how Min proficiency influenced the realization of Mandarin tones in Mandarin-Min bilinguals. Forty subjects recruited were divided into the high and the low Min proficiency groups. Isolated Mandarin syllables carrying one of the four Mandarin tones were recorded. Results showed that Min proficiency was roughly in negative correlation with pitch height for high tonal targ...

An asthma flare-up, which some people call an asthma attack or episode, happens when a person's airways get swollen and narrower and it becomes a lot harder for air to get in and out of the lungs. Asthma affects about 1 or 2 kids out of 10. Asthma is one disease that children start to develop even before the age of 5. This asthma is very difficult to diagnose during the young age. Most of the t...

In naturalistic settings, it is sometimes ambiguous whether or not a particular exemplar exhibits various properties indicative of category membership. We show that individuals prefer to group exemplars into categories that have a narrower latent scope – categories that specify fewer unobserved features – to those with a broader scope. In Experiment 1, participants classified suspects with fewe...

Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AAdi or AdiA) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the narrower one should allow a rational learner to select...

The meridional transport in the Pacific Ocean subtropical cell is studied for the period from 2004 to 2011 using gridded Argo temperature and salinity profiles and atmospheric reanalysis surface winds. The poleward Ekman and equatorward geostrophic branches of the subtropical cell exhibit an El Ni~ no–Southern Oscillation signature with strong meridional transport occurring during La Ni~ na and...

In the ideal world, cryptographic models take for granted that the secret sources (e.g. secret keys and other secret randomness) are derived from uniform distribution. However, in reality, we may only obtain some ‘weak’ random sources guaranteed with high unpredictability (e.g. biometric data, physical sources, and secrets with partial leakage). Formally, the security of cryptographic models is...