A cross-linguistic review of citation tone production studies: Methodology and recommendations.

The study of citation tones, lexical tones produced in isolation, is one of the first steps towards understanding speech prosody in tone languages. However, methodologies for investigating citation tones vary significantly, often leading to limited comparability of tone inventories, both within and across languages. This paper presents a systematic review of research methods and practices in 136 citation tone studies on 129 tonal language varieties in China, including 99 studies published in Chinese, which are therefore not easily available to an international scientific readership.

Chinese nurses' perceptions on toxic leadership behaviours of nurse managers: A qualitative study.

Aim: The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of Chinese registered nurses on toxic leadership behaviours of nurse managers and to determine its type, cause and response measures.

Background: The nurse manager is the front-line leader of the nurses who provide services directly to patients. Previous evidence suggests that toxic leadership behaviours of nurse managers do exist and it is necessary to understand the specifics of it.

Using AI chatbots to provide self-help depression interventions for university students: A randomized trial of effectiveness.

Background: Depression impacts the lives of a large number of university students. Mobile-based therapy chatbots are increasingly being used to help young adults who suffer from depression. However, previous trials have short follow-up periods.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of asymmetric processing of consonant duration in fake Mandarin geminates.

Unlike languages where consonant duration is used contrastively to distinguish word meanings, long consonants in Mandarin Chinese only occur across morpheme boundaries as a result of concatenation and are referred to as fake geminates. To investigate whether Mandarin speakers employ duration contrast to differentiate fake Mandarin geminates and corresponding singletons as well as the underlying pattern of the processing, two auditory oddball tasks were carried out to measure the component of MMN, an index of the automatic detection of deviant stimulus. Mandarin pseudoword pairs which differ only in the duration of the medial consonant ([an1 an1] ∼ [an1 nan1] vs.

Asymmetric Influence of Vocalic Context on Mandarin Sibilants: Evidence From ERP Studies.

In the present study, we examine the interactive effect of vowels on Mandarin fricative sibilants using a passive oddball paradigm to determine whether the HEIGHT features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence preceding consonants with unspecified features. The stimuli are two pairs of Mandarin words ([sa] ∼ [ʂa] and [su] ∼ [ʂu]) contrasting in vowel HEIGHT ([LOW] vs. [HIGH]).

Potential electron donor for nanoiron supported hydrogenotrophic denitrification: H gas, Fe, ferrous oxides, Fe(aq), or Fe(ad)?

The mechanism of electron transmission in combined nanoiron-bacteria denitrification cannot be explained by the classic model, in which an FeH-nitrate transferring chain is proposed. In this study, we used characteristic techniques and electrochemical analysis to investigate the necessity of molecular hydrogen for the combined denitrifying system using commercial nanoiron with Alcaligenes eutrophus, and to analyze its potential electron donor. Based on our results, nitrate removal and its by-products (NO and NH) generation was not significantly affected by residual H gas, indicating that H was not necessary for hydrogenotrophic denitrification.

Quadratic discriminant analysis model for assessing the risk of cadmium pollution for paddy fields in a county in China.

In China, the cadmium (Cd) levels in paddy fields have increased, which has led to the excessive uptake of Cd into rice grains. In this study, we determined the physicochemical properties of soil samples, including the pH, soil organic matter (SOM) content, cation exchange capacity (CEC), and total Cd content (Cd) in order to establish a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) model for assessing the risk of Cd in rice and to calculate its prior probability. Decision tree and logistic regression models were also established for comparison.