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A growing body of literature suggests that the world's languages can be classified into three rhythm classes: mora-timed languages, stress-timed languages, and syllable-timed languages. However, scholars cannot agree on which rhythmic measures discriminate rhythm classes most satisfactorily and whether the speech rate factor should be considered. In this study, we analyze speech production by bilingual speakers, and compare their production with that of monolingual speakers and ESL speakers. Our rhythmic metric measure results show that when speech rate is taken into consideration, a combination of the two metric measures for vowels, Varco∆V and vocalic nPVI, is most reliable in discriminating different rhythm classes, while consonants do not seem effective, whether the speech rate factor is included or not.

Seed size is variable within many plant species, and understanding the underlying genetic factors can provide insights into mechanisms of local environmental adaptation. Here we make use of the abundant genomic and germplasm resources available for rice (Oryza sativa) to perform a large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) of grain width. Grain width varies widely within the crop and is also known to show climate-associated variation across populations of its wild progenitor. Using a filtered dataset of >1.9 million genome-wide SNPs in a sample of 570 cultivated and wild rice accessions, we performed GWAS with two complementary models, GLM and MLM. The models yielded 10 and 33 significant associations, respectively, and jointly yielded seven candidate locus regions, two of which have been previously identified. Analyses of nucleotide diversity and haplotype distributions at these loci revealed signatures of selection and patterns consistent with adaptive introgression of grain width alleles across rice variety groups. The results provide a 50% increase in the total number of rice grain width loci mapped to date and support a polygenic model whereby grain width is shaped by gene-by-environment interactions. These loci can potentially serve as candidates for studies of adaptive seed size variation in wild grass species.