The Roles of Consonant, Rime, and Tone in Mandarin Spoken Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study

This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime, and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers (all born and grew up in Beijing) were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word (e.g., tang2 “candy”), nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the target: consonant competitor (e.g., ti1 “ladder”), rime competitor (e.g., lang4 “wave”), tone competitor (e.g., niu2 “cow”), consonant plus rime competitor (e.g., tang1”soup”), consonant plus tone competitor (e.g., tou2 “head”), rime plus tone competitor (e.g., yang2 “sheep”), cohort competitor (e.g., ta3 “tower”), cohort plus tone competitor (e.g., tao2 “peach”), and baseline competitor (e.g., xue3 “snow”). A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that (1) competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. (2) Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; (3) like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components.

A non-continuous soft mapping that preserves some structural soft sets

As everyday problems contain a lot of data and ambiguity, it has become necessary to develop new mathematical approaches to address them and soft set theory is the best tool to deal with such problems. Hence, in this article, we introduce a non-continuous mapping in soft settings called soft U -continuous. We mainly focus on studying soft U -continuity and its connection to soft continuity. We further show that soft U -continuity preserves soft compact sets and soft connected sets. The later sets have various applications in computing science and decision making theory. In the end, we show that if each soft U -continuous mapping f from a soft space X into a soft T 0-space Y is soft continuous, then Y is soft T 1.

Continuous Mapping Identifies Loci Associated With Weevil Resistance [Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar)] in a Triploid Banana Population

The first step toward marker-assisted selection is linking the phenotypes to molecular markers through quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis. While the process is straightforward in self-pollinating diploid (2x) species, QTL analysis in polyploids requires unconventional methods. In this study, we have identified markers associated with weevil Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar) resistance in bananas using 138 triploid (2n = 3x) hybrids derived from a cross between a tetraploid “Monyet” (2n = 4x) and a 2x “Kokopo” (2n = 2x) banana genotypes. The population was genotyped by Diversity Arrays Technology Sequencing (DArTSeq), resulting in 18,009 polymorphic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) between the two parents. Marker–trait association was carried out by continuous mapping where the adjusted trait means for the corm peripheral damage (PD) and total cross-section damage (TXD), both on the logit scale, were regressed on the marker allele frequencies. Forty-four SNPs that were associated with corm PD were identified on the chromosomes 5, 6, and 8, with 41 of them located on chromosome 6 and segregated in “Kokopo.” Eleven SNPs associated with corm total TXD were identified on chromosome 6 and segregated in “Monyet.” The additive effect of replacing one reference allele with the alternative allele was determined at each marker position. The PD QTL was confirmed using conventional QTL linkage analysis in the simplex markers segregating in “Kokopo” (AAAA × RA). We also identified 43 putative genes in the vicinity of the markers significantly associated with the two traits. The identified loci associated with resistance to weevil damage will be used in the efforts of developing molecular tools for marker-assisted breeding in bananas.

Existence and nonexistence of entire k-convex radial solutions to Hessian type system

In this paper, a Hessian type system is studied. After converting the existence of an entire solution to the existence of a fixed point of a continuous mapping, the existence of entire k-convex radial solutions is established by the monotone iterative method. Moreover, a nonexistence result is also obtained.

A Study on Some Properties of Neutrosophic Multi Topological Group

In this paper, we studied some properties of the neutrosophic multi topological group. For this, we introduced the definition of semi-open neutrosophic multiset, semi-closed neutrosophic multiset, neutrosophic multi regularly open set, neutrosophic multi regularly closed set, neutrosophic multi continuous mapping, and then studied the definition of a neutrosophic multi topological group and some of their properties. Moreover, since the concept of the almost topological group is very new, we introduced the definition of neutrosophic multi almost topological group. Finally, for the purpose of symmetry, we used the definition of neutrosophic multi almost continuous mapping to define neutrosophic multi almost topological group and study some of its properties.

MODIFIED PROXIMAL POINT ALGORITHM FOR MINIMIZATION AND FIXED POINT PROBLEM IN CAT(0) SPACES

In this paper, we study modified-type proximal point algorithm for approximating a common solution of a lower semi-continuous mapping and fixed point of total asymptotically nonexpansive mapping in complete CAT(0) spaces. Under suitable conditions, some strong convergence theorems of the proposed algorithms to such a common solution are proved.