Lexical pitch accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese have been claimed to exhibit variation in phonological inventory and/or phonetic manifestation of pitch accents. This paper reports variations in the phonetic manifestation as well as phonological patterning of the lexical H*+L pitch accent in two Ryukyuan dialects – Shuri and Nakijin. The F0 manifestation of H*+L pitch accent in the t...

The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which display an F0 contrast in the other dialects. The production and perception of tones in the three dialects is investigated, using recordings and perception tests. As expected...

Identifying the different varieties of the same language is more challenging than unrelated languages identification. In this paper, we propose an approach to discriminate language varieties or dialects of Mandarin Chinese for the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia and Singapore, a.k.a., the Greater China Region (GCR). When applied to the dialects identification of the GCR, we f...

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...

Based on the materials of Russian dialects Outer Manchuria, this article examines previously unstudied group adverbs – place. The methods continuous sampling and descriptive-analytical analysis revealed 56 place in second edition “Dictionary Dialects Manchuria”. Despite fact that literary language are have been thoroughly studied from perspective their semantics, m...

We associate optimality theory with abduction and preference handling. We present linguistic problems that appear in the study of dialects as new application of abduction and preference handling. Differences in German dialects originate from different rankings of linguistic constraints which determine the well-formedness of expressions within a language. We introduce a framework for analyzing d...

Infants might be better at teasing apart dialects with different language rules when hearing the dialects at different times, since language learners do not always combine input heard at different times. However, no previous research has independently varied the temporal distribution of conflicting language input. Twelve-month-olds heard two artificial language streams representing different di...

This paper addresses the use of a data-driven approach to determine a multidialectal phone set for an automatic speech recognition system for Spanish dialects. This approach is based on a decision tree clustering algorithm that tries to cluster contextual units of different dialects. This procedure avoids the definition of a global phonetic inventory and the previous study of similarity of soun...

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...