The paper introduces SVALex, a lexical resource primarily aimed at learners and teachers of Swedish as a foreign and second language that describes the distribution of 15,681 words and expressions across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The resource is based on a corpus of coursebook texts, and thus describes receptive vocabulary learners are exposed to during reading activiti...

Assessing vocabulary difficulty is useful for finding and creating texts at low reading levels. Prior work has focused on characteristics such as word length and word frequency. In this work, we explore whether other cues might be useful, using features extracted from Wiktionary entries. Comparing words in comparable articles in Standard and Simple English Wikipedia, we find that words that app...

A key issue in language acquisition is to improve native-like proficiency in vocabulary use. One solution to this is to identify word frequencies (especially in conjunction with core vocabulary) and collocation patterns based on native speakers discourse. In this paper, I first discuss some of the puzzles presented in some long-standing and recent quantitative observations of the Mandarin lexic...

The purpose of the present study was to identify any significant relationship between critical thinking ability, L2 vocabulary knowledge, and L2 vocabulary learning strategies of Iranian EFL learners. To this aim, the productive vocabulary levels test was administered to measure the learner’s L2 vocabulary knowledge and observe homogeneity in terms of vocabulary knowledge. At the second stage, ...

A time-varying Wiener filter extracts a speech signal from a mixture using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio in a local time-frequency unit. We estimate this ratio using a binaural processor and derive a ratio time-frequency mask. This mask is used to extract the speech, which is then fed to a conventional speech recognizer operating in the cepstral domain. We compare the performance of this s...

A time-varying Weiner filter extracts the speech signal from a noisy mixture using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio in a local time-frequency unit. We estimate this ratio using a binaural processor and derive a ratio time-frequency mask. This mask is used to extract the speech signal, which is then fed to a conventional speech recognizer operating in the cepstral domain. We compare the perfor...

PURPOSE This article introduces theoretically driven acoustic measures of /s/ that reflect aerodynamic and articulatory conditions. The measures were evaluated by assessing whether they revealed expected changes over time and labiality effects, along with possible gender differences suggested by past work. METHOD Productions of /s/ were extracted from various speaking tasks from typically spe...

Responses of Gabor wavelets in the mid-frequency space build a local spectral representation scheme with optimal properties regarding the time-frequency uncertainty principle. However, when using Gabor wavelets we observe a skewness in the mid-frequency space caused by the spreading effect of Gabor wavelets. Though in most current applications the skewness does not obstruct the sampling of the ...