We present new data and semantic parsing methods for the problem of mapping English sentences to Bash commands (NL2Bash). Our long-term goal is to enable any user to perform operations such as file manipulation, search, and application-specific scripting by simply stating their goals in English. We take a first step in this domain, by providing a new dataset of challenging but commonly used Bas...

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each targe...

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingu...

Across four studies, we directly compared children’s essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual’s lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each targe...

Linguistic research has become heavily reliant on text corpora over the past ten years. Such resources are becoming increasingly available through efforts such as the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in the US and the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) in Europe. However, in the main the corpora that are gathered and distributed through these and other mechanisms consist of texts wh...

English vowel productions were acoustically examined in a group of native Mandarin speakers. The first and second formant frequencies (F1 & F2) of 11 English vowels were examined in the syllable-level productions of 40 Mandarin speakers compared to 40 American English speakers. Results of the comparative acoustic analysis indicated that the Mandarin speakers differed significantly from the Amer...

Acoustic characteristics of American English sentence stress produced by native Mandarin speakers are reported. Fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the sentence-level stress produced by 40 Mandarin speakers were compared to those of 40 American English speakers. Results obtained from two methods of stress calculation indicated that Mandarin speakers of American En...

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of English vowels. Two groups of Persian EFL learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of American English. Vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. Ladefoged and Maddison’s (1996) F1 F2 measurements for American English v...