The thermal stress caused by high temperatures on cut rose flowers grown in greenhouses is a major environmental impact that reduces the yield of growing during summer. To confirm resistance grafted to high-temperature stress, roses were greenhouse summer season and analyzed for yield, quality, root activity, photo-physiological characteristics. A morphological change was observed stomata flowe...

Grafting has been increasingly used to overcome soilborne pathogens. The commercial rootstock hybrids AF-8253 (Sakata) and Fortaleza (Takii), as well Embrapa’s new hybrid, BRS Acará, were evaluated rootstocks for the bell pepper Margarita (Syngenta) Pampa (Clause) scions, under natural infestation of Ralstonia pseudosolanacearum, upon artificial inoculation with a) ten isolates, b) one Phytopht...

Mandarin Chinese has two orthographic systems: Chinese characters and Pinyin. While Pinyin is transparent to Mandarin pronunciation, characters are opaque and seldom relate to sound. This study aims to find out the effect of these two systems on Cantonese listeners who are L2 learners of Mandarin. Native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers participated in word recognition experiments which included a ...

This paper presents a study of the similarity between Cantonese and Mandarin spoken and written texts. Spontaneous speech in Cantonese consists of colloquial and filler phrases but it’s keywords similar to Mandarin. We use a statistical tool to extract Cantonese phrases from a spontaneous speech database. We collected using a Wizard-of-Oz setup. More fillers are collected from written Cantonese...

The speech intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences of various spectral regions, regarding band-stop conditions (one or two “holes” in the spectrum), was investigated through subjective listening tests. Results demonstrated significant effects on Mandarin Chinese sentence intelligibilities when a single or a pair of spectral holes was introduced. Meanwhile, it revealed the importance of th...

Mandarin Chinese does not allow consonant finals except /n/ and /ng/. This raises questions concerning how well Mandarin speakers learning German can produce a clear /l/ at syllable final positions. This study investigates 490 German speech tokens with embedded postvocalic /l/ produced by 12 Mandarin speakers from 3 different levels and 2 native German speakers. Acoustic analyses indicate that ...

In this paper, we investigate the relative perceptual importance of the temporal envelop (TE) and temporal fine structure (TFS) between tonal language and non-tonal language perception. The “auditory chimera” experiment is conducted on both American English and Mandarin Chinese with the same conditions. Our experimental results show that there is no significant perceptual difference of TE and T...

Recent research has found that there is an overlap in the processing of music and speech in certain aspects. This research focuses on the relationship between the pitch of tones in language and the melody of songs. We present an automatic music composition system based on the prosody rules of Mandarin and we hypothesize that songs generated with our proposed system can help non-native Mandarin ...

This paper describes a crosslinguistic disfluency perception experiment. We tested the recognizability of pause fillers and partial words in English, German and Mandarin. Subjects were speakers of English with no knowledge of Mandarin or German. We found that subjects could identify disfluent from fluent utterances at a level above chance. Pause fillers were easier to identify than partial word...

Based on the noise-replacement paradigm, recent studies showed that vowels carried more perceptional information for sentence intelligibility than consonants. Considering that vowels contain many important acoustic cues for speech perception, this study further assessed the effect of spectral degradation to the intelligibility of Mandarin vowel sentences. Mandarin sentences were processed to ge...