Chang Han

Certain speech sounds are consistently associated with visual properties such as shape and size, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. Well‐established examples demonstrate that the vowel /u/ is often linked to rounder and larger objects, while /i/ is associated with more angular and smaller ones. However, most previous research utilized English pseudowords, leaving a gap in our understanding of how these correspondences manifest in tonal languages. The current study extends the investigation to Mandarin Chinese, a tonal language, to examine the roles of vowels, consonants, and lexical tones in sound–shape and sound–size correspondences. Participants heard consonant‐vowel‐tone syllables and rated each on a 5‐point scale with rounder/more angular shapes or larger/smaller icons at opposite ends. The results confirmed the established vowel effect: /u/ was associated with rounder and larger patterns than /i/. Results for consonants demonstrated that the voiced–unvoiced contrast predicted sound–shape judgments, while the aspirated–unaspirated contrast, which is less prominent in English, influenced sound–size judgments. Lexical tones also revealed systematic effects, with Tone 1 (flat), Tone 2 (rising), Tone 3 (falling–rising), and Tone 4 (falling) progressively matched from rounder to more angular shapes, while Tones 1 and 2 were linked to larger sizes than Tones 3 and 4. These phonemic features reliably predicted crossmodal correspondences even when controlling for acoustic properties, suggesting robust mappings between phonemic and visual representations. This study highlights the common vowel effects across Mandarin and English while revealing unique influences of consonants and lexical tones, underscoring the role of language experience in shaping crossmodal correspondences.

Taiwan has a complete semiconductor industry chain and is important in global semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to considering operational conditions, companies have also attached importance to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in recent years. This research thus takes 60 integrated circuit (IC) companies in Taiwan as a research sample and adopts the Meta Two-stage dynamic RDM DDF (range directional model directional distance function) under an exogenous CSR model to explore their market stage efficiency and production stage efficiency. This study aimed to analyze whether incorporating a company's CSR performance into performance evaluations affects the production and profitability efficiency of Taiwanese IC companies. The findings are as follows: Most IC companies practice CSR and demonstrate good CSR performance. The market stage efficiency and production stage efficiency of the IC packaging and testing group are better than those of other groups.

Thermanaerovibrio velox Zavarzina et al. 2000 is a member of the Synergistaceae, a family in the phylum Synergistetes that is already well-characterized at the genome level. Members of this phylum were described as Gram-negative staining anaerobic bacteria with a rod/vibrioid cell shape and possessing an atypical outer cell envelope. They inhabit a large variety of an-aerobic environments including soil, oil wells, wastewater treatment plants and animal gas-trointestinal tracts. They are also found to be linked to sites of human diseases such as cysts, abscesses, and areas of periodontal disease. The moderately thermophilic and organotrophic T. velox shares most of its morphologic and physiologic features with the closely related spe-cies, T. acidaminovorans. In addition to Su883T, the type strain of T. acidaminovorans, stain Z-9701T is the second type strain in the genus Thermanaerovibrio to have its genome se-quence published. Here we describe the features of this organism, together with the non-contiguous genome sequence and annotation. The 1,880,838 bp long chromosome with its 1,751 protein-coding and 59 RNA genes is a part of the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea project. © BY-SA.

This chapter applies Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical analyses of ‘naked life’ and ‘camp’ to the question of des hommes étrangers in Taiwan and France. The concept of ‘naked life’ applies to a person who is excluded from human jurisdictions and reduced to a merely biological existence. Similarly, what Agamben calls ‘camp’ emerges when a determinate order exercises the management of biological life so as to produce a discursive space which either limits or abolishes the subject’s rights. Camp may thus occur in many forms, be it a concentration camp, a detention room in the airport, or the declaration of a state of exception in a country. Therefore, Agamben’s work helps us understand the liminal spaces that hommes étrangers occupy in a global modern society. In the context of the modern nation-state, the mobility and the conditions of these hommes étrangers problematize above all our definitions of space and territory. The chapter thus aims to study how the status of hommes étrangers, which involves elements of both inclusion and exclusion, continuously shapes a suspended space in the nation-state. The key argument is that the contemporary nation-state, empowered with the sovereignty over human life, sees human life as a political construct and attempts to manage it biopolitically in the framework of citizenship (that is to say, as a population of physical and political bodies in need of government).1 Hence, it is due to this perception of citizenship and the value attached to sovereignty that the hommes étrangers remain perpetually in a peculiar grey-area. Likewise, the chapter will show how the modern nation-state gives rise to legal inequalities that are to the detriment of the foreign population.