Cross-linguistic studies between intonational languages suggest that there is a universal trend during the L2 learning process regarding pitch and temporal characteristics. We extend these hypotheses to Chinese learners of Peninsular Spanish-a new pairing tone non-tone languages. Using six metrics, we examine how learners’ profiles deviated from those L1 native speakers explore factors may cont...

The ideas presented in this paper have arisen out of the work on a database system designed for the description and comparison of human languages in a theoretically well-founded and systematic way. The Cross-linguistic Reference Grammar (CRG) is a database application for unified descriptions of natural languages of any kind, including signed languages, that has been developed at LMU Munich. Th...

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...

A central part of NLP research is devoted to the development of parsing systems which analyze the way words combine to form phrases and sentences. This analysis is considered the first step towards natural language understanding, or, as it is often put, extracting “who did what to whom”. Such information is crucial for computer programs that perform tasks such as information retrieval, question...

Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) are rooted, directional and labeled graphs that abstract away from morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies such as word category (verbs and nouns), word order, and function words (determiners, some prepositions). Because these syntactic idiosyncrasies account for many of the cross-lingual differences, it would be interesting to see if this representation can serv...

Languages differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories; however, cross-linguistic surveys indicate that certain vowels and vowel system configurations are preferred. A cross-linguistic comparison of the acoustic vowel categories of two languages that differ in vowel inventory size, namely, English and Spanish, was performed in order to reveal some of the language-specific and/or univers...

A comparison of the influence style ethics in Thailand and the U.S. for managers in two life stage (age) groups, early adulthood and middle adulthood is presented. Our findings confirm that Eastern and Western cultures emphasize different influence styles. Our findings also indicate that life stage is as important as culture, and possibly more important than culture, in explaining the ethical p...

Please cite this article in press as: Y.-G. Jia Vis. Image Understand. (2008), doi:10.101 Bag-of-visual-words (BoW) has recently become a popular representation to describe video and image content. Most existing approaches, nevertheless, neglect inter-word relatedness and measure similarity by bin-to-bin comparison of visual words in histograms. In this paper, we explore the linguistic and onto...