This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder, and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD (...) produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers’ input, with TD children’s input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children’s general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities. (shrink)

This article investigates the factors affecting how public relations autonomy, legal dominance, and strategic orientation affect crisis communicative response in corporate contexts. Communication managers, crisis managers, public affairs managers, and/or public relations managers were solicited from Taiwan’s top 500 companies to participate in a survey. The results revealed that, in contrast to public relations autonomy being the strongest and sole predictor of concession strategy, legal dominance could predict defensive and diversionary responses in crisis events. The article concludes with a discussion (...) of practical applications and theoretical implications. (shrink)

In an effort at ethical reform, Taiwan recently revised the Hospice Palliative Care Law authorising family members or physicians to make surrogate decisions to discontinue life-sustaining treatment if an incompetent terminally ill patient did not express their wishes while still competent. In particular, Article 7 of the new law authorises the palliative care team, namely the physicians, to act as sole decision-makers on behalf of the incompetent terminally ill patient's best interests if no family member is available. However, the law (...) fails to provide guidance as to what constitutes the patient's best interests or what specific procedures the treating physicians should follow, and so has raised constitutional concerns. It may be difficult to translate ethical reform into law but it is not impossible if essential requirements are carefully followed. First, there must be substantial nexus between the purpose of the statute and the measures provided under the statute. Second, advocates need to convince the public that futility or waste has amounted to a public health emergency so as to justify lower procedural requirements. Third, a remedy or compensation should be available if the surrogate decisions have not been appropriately made. Fourth, minimum procedural safeguards are necessary even though the statute is intended to reduce the procedural burdens of making surrogate decisions on behalf of incompetent patients who lack family members and did not express their wishes while still competent. (shrink)

This research examines the impact of an online platform’s revenue model on consumers’ ethical inferences of the company. We demonstrate that consumers perceive online platforms that employ the advertising-based revenue model to be less ethical than platforms that employ the service-fee-based revenue model because platforms that adopt the advertising-based revenue model are thought to be less consumer-serving motivated. The unfavorable ethical inferences induced by the advertising-based revenue model further lower consumers’ intention to disclose personal information and the intention to generate (...) positive word of mouth for the company. We further find that allowing consumers to skip advertisements does not improve the less favorable ethical inferences while using resources for public-service advertisements does. These findings advance the understanding of consumers’ ethical inferences regarding business models and provide insights for managers to develop effective strategies to alleviate less favorable ethical inferences. (shrink)

This study examines whether human gaze lacking the confounding factor of eye whites can be processed unconsciously and explores the critical aspects for such process. Utilizing the continuous flash suppression paradigm, a schematic face—with direct or averted gaze, and with neutral, fearful or happy expressions—was presented to one eye while dynamic masks rendered it invisible to the other eye. Schematic faces were used to avoid unwanted influence from salient eye whites. Participants’ detection time of anything other than the masks was (...) used as an index of unconscious processing time. Faster detection was found for faces with direct gaze than those with averted gaze. However, there was no difference between detection times for different facial expressions and upright-face, inverted-face, and eyes-only conditions . These results confirm that, with schematic faces, gaze can be processed unconsciously regardless of facial expression, and eyes alone are sufficient for such process. (shrink)

The high-tech industry is the main force promoting the development of China’s national economy. As its industrial economic strength grows, China’s high-tech industry is increasingly using cross-border mergers and acquisitions as an important way to “go out.” To explore the rules governing the process and operation mechanism of reverse knowledge transfer through the CBM&A of China’s high-tech industry under government intervention, a tripartite evolutionary game model of the government, the parent company, and the subsidiary as the main subjects is constructed (...) in this paper. The strategies adopted by the three subjects in the RKT game process are analysed, and the factors influencing RKT through CBM&A under government intervention are simulated and analysed using Python 3.7 software. The results show that, under government intervention, the parent company and subsidiary have different degrees of influence on each other. Subsidiaries are highly sensitive to the compensation rate of RKT. Positive intervention by the government tends to foster stable cooperation between the parent company and the subsidiary. However, over time, the government gradually relaxes its intervention in the RKT and innovation of multinational companies. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, a series of chain reactions, like international trade breakdown, stock market collapse, and crude oil's collapse, have adversely affected the global economy, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. As a result, the Chinese government issued many fiscal and financial policies to support SMEs. This paper analyzes SMEs' coping methods and conceptual changes affected by the epidemic and distinguishes “victims” and “beneficiaries.” Subsequently, based on extensive international experience and local government experience, it provides effective suggestions for the (...) Chinese government to deal with the post-epidemic era's economic changes, policy suggestions, and coping strategies for SMEs' short-term and long-term sustainable development. (shrink)

In recent decades, the Heidelberg School’s contributions have become a subject in the philosophical research into self-consciousness. Henrich addressed the reflection model and its problem of begging the question. Later, Frank applied the ex negativo reasoning method to the reflection model to review theories of self-consciousness, including Fichte’s analysis. For Fichte, self-consciousness is immediate, non-objective, and pre-reflective. In order to avoid the problem of infinite regress, the relationship between self-consciousness and object-consciousness should be immediate and non-objective. Pre-reflectivity refers to the (...) relationship between self-consciousness and reflection, that is to say, before the reflection, the self-consciousness has already taken place, and is thus its precondition. In Fichte’s concept of self-consciousness, non-objectivity and pre-reflectivity are different characteristics that neither concern the explanation of how self-consciousness is formed nor solve the problem of begging the question. Therefore, it is not appropriate to criticize Fichte’s analysis of self-consciousness applying the ex negativo methodology to the reflection model. (shrink)

The impacts of COVID-19 may be magnified in a shared environment like the household, especially with people spending extended time at home during the pandemic. Family resilience is the ability of a family to adapt to crisis and can be a protective factor against stress and negative affect. While there have been calls to address family resilience during the pandemic, there is a lack of empirical study on its benefit. In this dyadic observational study, we sought to investigate the concordance (...) of family members’ psychological responses to COVID-19, whether dyad members’ risk factors mutually affected each other’s psychological responses, and importantly, whether family resilience was a significant factor in these responses. A total of 200 family dyads from the same household completed the Family Resilience Assessment Scale and questionnaires on COVID-19 threat perception, impacts, and exposure. We found concordant dyad responses for COVID-19 threat perception, but not for psychological impact. Using the Actor-Partner-Interdependence Model framework, we found that one’s psychological impact was affected by the financial impact from both dyad members. After controlling for risk factors and demographic covariates, we found that family resilience significantly associated with lower COVID-19 psychological impact, though not with threat perception. The findings suggest that both family and individual factors need to be addressed and there may be benefit in addressing multilevel risk and protective factors using an ecological systems approach, which may help prepare the population for future crises. (shrink)

In this review, we summarize studies investigating comprehension of three core grammatical structures (Subject-Verb-Object word order, grammatical aspect and wh-questions) in diverse samples of Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD, all utilizing the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) paradigm. Results showed that children with ASD, though they were delayed in chronological age and expressive language (including significantly lower vocabulary production scores), acquired various grammatical constructions similarly to their typically developing peers. Moreover, Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD demonstrated similar acquisition patterns of these three core (...) grammatical structures, as has been reported in previous IPL studies among English-acquiring children with ASD (Naigles & Fein, 2017). Thus, the results testify that universal underlying mechanisms are playing vital roles in grammatical acquisition of children with ASD across languages (e.g., the setting of word order parameters, the preservation of functional morphemes, the universal operation of WH-Movement), despite their pervasive social cognition impairments. These findings suggest that core grammatical knowledge may be preserved in children with ASD, even in the face of radical differences in language environment and social/communicative deficits, supporting the contribution of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition. The results shed light on the sharp contrast between linguistic competence (governed by the internal computational system of the language faculty) vs. linguistic performance (affected by loci of impairment in the sensory-motor and the conceptual-intentional interfaces) in ASD. Furthermore, the results highlight the dissociation between the lexical vs. the grammatical modules in ASD, supporting a modular view of the diverse language domains in the language faculty. (shrink)

Bistable figures provide a fascinating window through which to explore human visual awareness. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the semantic context provided by a background auditory soundtrack can modulate an observer’s predominant percept while watching the bistable “my wife or my mother-in-law” figure . The possibility of a response-bias account—that participants simply reported the percept that happened to be congruent with the soundtrack that they were listening to—was excluded in Experiment 2. We further demonstrate that this crossmodal (...) semantic effect was additive with the manipulation of participants’ visual fixation , while it interacted with participants’ voluntary attention . These results indicate that audiovisual semantic congruency constrains the visual processing that gives rise to the conscious perception of bistable visual figures. Crossmodal semantic context therefore provides an important mechanism contributing to the emergence of visual awareness. (shrink)