Japanese dialects are largely classified into two types in terms of prosodic systems, one having a lexical pitch contrast and the other having no such contrast. Dialects of the latter type are called ‘accentless’ dialects. Many previous studies reported that, in areas where an accentless dialect had been originally spoken, younger speakers acquired Standard Japanese lexical pitch accent and are...

Short-term accommodation is considered as one of the main factors in dialect levelling and the spread of linguistic innovations. This study investigates how speakers of Grison and Zurich German two Swiss German dialects shift their productions of short vowels after being exposed to each other's dialect in a dialogue. We found asymmetrical behaviour in accommodation between the two dialects: on ...

This paper provides an acoustic study of monophthongal vowels (i e ɛ ɨ ʌ a u o) in eight South Korean dialects based on a dialectal speech corpus created by the National Institute of the Korean Language (2004-2011). The spontaneous speech data were automatically segmented by force-aligning them with phonemic transcriptions. Multiple formant values using different LPC formant ceiling settings we...

Previous studies have revealed that, depending on the language, listeners can identify speakers’ dialects quite well. The role of segments and prosody in this task is largely unknown, however. In a between-subjects design, we tested a total of 30 listeners in two conditions: in the unmorphed condition, listeners heard original sentences from two Swiss German dialects; in the duration morphed co...

The DLF dialects of description logic are fragments of first order logic with underlying signatures based on unary predicate symbols and on unary function symbols interpreted as total functions. In earlier work, we have shown how computational properties of logical consequence for dialects of this family without inverse features are preserved when unary function symbols are interpreted instead ...

While Modern Standard Arabic is the formal spoken and written language of the Arab world; dialects are the major communication mode for everyday life. Therefore, identifying a speaker’s dialect is critical in the Arabic-speaking world for speech processing tasks, such as automatic speech recognition or identification. In this paper, we examine two approaches that reduce the Universal Background...

In this paper we apply various clustering algorithms to the dialect pronunciation data. At the same time we propose several evaluation techniques that should be used in order to deal with the instability of the clustering techniques. The results have shown that three hierarchical clustering algorithms are not suitable for the data we are working with. The rest of the tested algorithms have succ...