The exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (EU) single market and customs union has adversely affected trade prospects of many developing economies that depended on the UK market for their exports. This paper investigates the impact of Brexit on African countries' exports to the UK. The comparison is based upon trade between the set of African countries which export most to the UK and the EU. It provides a quantitative assessment of the trade effect through the use of descriptive analysis and empirical estimations by employing the difference-in-difference (DID) estimation approach. The descriptive analysis finds that the share of African exports sent to the UK has declined since the Brexit announcement in 2016. The empirical estimations using the DID approach also demonstrate a drop of 20–30% in African countries exports to the UK relative to the EU-27 in this period. These results hold to a battery of robustness checks, including the use of an alternative estimation approach, varying sample size, and the use of alternative counterfactuals. We further show that the trade flows started to drop immediately after the announcement of the Brexit referendum in 2015 but the main drop came after the Brexit referendum results became evident. These findings imply the need for policy intervention and support for African countries to revitalize their trade flows and alleviate the unintended effects of this trade shock.

This study investigated how Korean toddlers’ perception of stop categories develops in the acoustic dimensions of VOT and F0. To examine the developmental trajectory of VOT and F0 in toddlers’ perceptual space, a perceptual identification test with natural and synthesized sound stimuli was conducted with 58 Korean monolingual children (aged 2–4 years). The results revealed that toddlers’ perceptual mapping functions on VOT mainly in the high-pitch environment, resulting in more successful perceptual accuracy in fortis or aspirated stops than in lenis stops. F0 development is correlated with the perceptual distinction of lenis from aspirated stops, but no consistent categorical perception for F0 was found before four years of age. The findings suggest that multi-parametric control in perceptual development guides an acquisition ordering of Korean stop phonemes and that tonal development is significantly related to the acquisition of Korean phonemic contrasts.

Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes pitch perception in specific ways, and consequently Chinese speakers may not process pitch in English words – e.g., “Rose?” spoken as a question versus “Rose” spoken as a statement – in the same way as native speakers of non-tonal languages do. If so, what are those pitch processing differences and how do they affect Chinese recognition of English words? We investigated these questions by administering a primed lexical-decision task in English to proficient Chinese–English bilinguals and two control groups, namely, Spanish–English and native English speakers. Prime-target pairs differed in one sound and/or in pitch. Results showed specific cross-language differences in pitch processing between the Chinese speakers and the control groups, confirming that experience with a tonal language shaped the perception of English words' intonation. Moreover, such experience helps to incorporate pitch into models of word-recognition for bilinguals of tonal and non-tonal languages.

Oilseed rape (Brassica napus) is sexually compatible with its wild and weedy relative B. rapa, and introgression of genes from B. napus has been found to occur over a few generations. We simulated the early stages of transgene escape by producing F1 hybrids and the first backcross generation between two lines of transgenic B. napus and two populations of weedy B. rapa. Transgene expression and the fitness of the hybrids were examined under different environmental conditions. Expression of the transgenes was analyzed at the mRNA level by quantitative PCR and found to be stable in the hybrids, regardless of the genetic background and the environment, and equal to the level of transcription in the parental B. napus lines. Vigor of the hybrids was measured as the photosynthetic capability; pollen viability and seed set per silique. Photosynthetic capability of first generation hybrids was found to be at the same level, or higher, than that of the parental species, whereas the reproductive fitness was significantly lower. The first backcross generation had a significantly lower photosynthetic capability and reproductive fitness compared to the parental species. This is the first study that examines transgene expression at the mRNA level in transgenic hybrids of B. napus of different genetic background exposed to different environmental conditions. The data presented clarify important details of the overall risk assessment of growing transgenic oilseed rape.