The present study investigated how the vowel system of the first language (Cantonese) affects the acquisition of vowels of a second language. Forty native Cantonese-speaking adults (20 males and 20 females), with ages between 19 years 4 months and 26 years 10 months were recruited. Data from the first and second formant frequencies indicated that, for both female and male speakers, production o...

Native English listeners from North America rely primarily on changes in formants, not vowel duration, when perceiving the vowel contrast in the minimal pair bit and beat manipulated from a Canadian English sample [5]. In this paper, we evaluated which cue do native English listeners from other regions use when perceiving the same North American vowel contrast. For this purpose, we used the sam...

This study is an attempt to carry out a comparative analysis using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM). The offering routine patterns of native Persian speakers was compared with that of Native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of NSM model which is claimed to be universal. The descriptive technique was the cultural scripts approach, using ...

In a recent data survey, the comparison of the 2011 data to the early 1990s data for English and French loans in Korean adaptation has revealed that the overall frequency of final vowel insertion and that of variable insertion and/or no vowel insertion after the word-final postvocalic plosives [b d g p t k] are significantly decreased and increased, respectively, no matter whether the plosives ...

Current understanding of disability and impairment has led to new approaches in Rehabilitation. In this issue of Iranian Rehabilitation Journal, a variety of articles introduces a new trend in rehabilitation. "Emotion pitch" of each vowel sound and Percentage of vowel correct is the subject which Talie Zarifian and her colleagues discussed in their article. Persian speaking children can get ben...

The K-means algorithm is the most commonly used clustering method for phonetic vowel description but has some properties that may be sub-optimal representing data. This study compares with an alternative algorithm, OPTICS, in two speech styles (lab vs. conversational) English to test whether OPTICS a viable characterizing spaces. We find noisier data, identifies clusters more accurately represe...

This paper sorts out the problem of Persian Vowel viseme clustering. Clustering audio-visual data has been discussed for a decade or so. However, it is an open problem due to shortcoming of appropriate data and its dependency to target language. Here, we propose a speaker-independent and robust method for Persian viseme class identification as our main contribution. The overall process of the p...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...