Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is a lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. In this present study, it is shown that syllable contraction is optional with the trough depth distribution as the evidence. Trough depth is also employed as the measure for gradience. In the perception experiment, listeners were asked to do a forced-choice identification task and the accuracy was generally high. The results from the production experiment not only verifies that syllable contraction is optional and gradient, but also show that durations and F0 range are the acoustic cues that contribute to the distinction between the fullycontracted tokens and the lexical tokens.

Pyrosequencing technologies such as 454/Roche and Solexa/Illumina vastly lower the cost of nucleotide sequencing compared to the traditional Sanger method, and thus promise to greatly expand the number of sequenced eukaryotic genomes. However, the new technologies also bring new challenges such as shorter reads and new kinds and higher rates of sequencing errors, which complicate genome assembly and gene prediction. At JGI we are deploying 454 technology for the sequencing and assembly of ever-larger eukaryotic genomes. Here we describe our first whole-genome annotation of a purely 454-sequenced fungal genome that is larger than a yeast (>30 Mbp). The pezizomycotine (filamentous ascomycote) Aspergillus carbonarius belongs to the Aspergillus section Nigri species complex, members of which are significant as platforms for bioenergy and bioindustrial technology, as members of soil microbial communities and players in the global carbon cycle, and as agricultural toxigens. Application of a modified version of the standard JGI Annotation Pipeline has so far predicted ~;;10k genes. ~;;12percent of these preliminary annotations suffer a potential frameshift error, which is somewhat higher than the ~;;9percent rate in the Sanger-sequenced and conventionally assembled and annotated genome of fellow Aspergillus section Nigri member A. niger. Also, >90percent of A. niger genes have potential homologs in the A. carbonarius preliminary annotation. We conclude, and with further annotation and comparative analysis expect to confirm, that 454 sequencing strategies provide a promising substrate for annotation of modestly sized eukaryotic genomes. We will also present results of annotation of a number of other pyrosequenced fungal genomes of bioenergy interest.

The goal of this study was to examine the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Group domain. Replicating Carlson et al.'s (2005) perception study, an experiment was conducted aiming to see whether Taiwanese listeners were able to predict the occurrence and strength of upcoming boundaries - Word, Tone Sandhi Group and Utterance. Stimuli were selected from a corpus of spontaneous Swedish speech and Taiwanese read speech, so as to vary in Boundary types (no break vs. weak break vs. strong break), Fragment size (long vs. short), and Filtering (normal vs. low-pass filtered). These fragments were presented to two Taiwanese listeners who were instructed to guess which a prosodic break would follow each fragment. Results revealed that Boundary type is a factor that influenced the judgments when stimuli with all boundary types, fragment sizes and filtering conditions were combined. Taiwanese listeners are able to differentiate strong break vs. weak break vs no break in Swedish and strong break vs. weak break in Taiwanese, but not weak break vs. no break in Taiwanese. In addition, Taiwanese listeners, like American English listeners in Carlson et al's study, were able to hear the boundaries in Swedish in normal speech. Acoustic and prosodic correlates from the Taiwanese stimuli were also examined. There was a significant but small correlation found between judgments and the pause duration. Final-word duration ratio and Energy seem to be the most reliable cues to differentiate all Boundary types. Moreover, voice quality analysis suggests that breathiness, rather than creakiness, was potentially used to distinguish Tone Sandhi Group boundaries from Utterance boundaries.

Excerpted from Karen Kuo, East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).

Reprinted with permission from Temple University Press.