Gambel's white-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii, is a long-distance migrant that, in contrast to other subspecies of white-crowned sparrow, does not form vocal dialects. I studied the process of vocal development in the field and laboratory to determine how it differed from the process in three other subspecies previously studied. Four common song types existed in a random spati...

In this article, we review three responses to the study and evaluation of grammar in children who speak nonmainstream dialects of English. Then we introduce a fourth, system-based response that views nonmainstream dialects of English, such as African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as made up of dialect-specific and dialect-universal features. To illustrate the usefulnes...

Formant frequency data for /l/ in 23 languages/dialects where the consonant may be typically clear or dark show that the two varieties of /l/ are set in contrast mostly in the context of /i/ but also next to /a/, and that a few languages/dialects may exhibit intermediate degrees of darkness in the consonant. F2 for /l/ is higher utterance initially than utterance finally, more so if the lateral...

Geographic variation in microsatellite allele frequencies was assessed at nine sites in two regional vocal dialects of the parrot Amazona auropalliata (yellow-naped amazon) to test for correspondence between dialects and population structure. There was no relationship between the genetic distances between individuals and their dialect membership. High rates of gene flow were estimated between v...

Recent years have seen increased interest within the speaker recognition community in high-level features including, for example, lexical choice, idiomatic expressions or syntactic structures. The promise of speaker recognition in forensic applications drives development toward systems robust to channel differences by selecting features inherently robust to channel difference. Within the langua...

Sequence-to-sequence models provide a simple and elegant solution for building speech recognition systems by folding separate components of a typical system, namely acoustic (AM), pronunciation (PM) and language (LM) models into a single neural network. In this work, we look at one such sequence-to-sequence model, namely listen, attend and spell (LAS) [1], and explore the possibility of trainin...

We present a work aimed on efficiently creating textual language dialects and supporting tools for them (e.g. compiler front-ends, IDE support, prettyprinters, etc.). A dialect is a language which may be described with a (relatively small) set of changes to some other language. For example we can consider SQL dialects used in DB-management systems. The need in creating dialects is witnessed by ...

Vocal learning, the substrate of human language acquisition, has rarely been described in other mammals. Often, group-specific vocal dialects in wild populations provide the main evidence for vocal learning. While social learning is often the most plausible explanation for these intergroup differences, it is usually impossible to exclude other driving factors, such as genetic or ecological back...

The Meertens Institute in Amsterdam was founded in 1930 under the name ‘Dialect Bureau’ (Dialectenbureau), and became an official institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1952. In 1979, it was named after its first director, P.J. Meertens (1899-1985), a student of 17th century Dutch literature. Currently it comprises two departments, one of Dutch Ethnology and o...

In this paper I present an analysis of surface realizations of palatalized labials in several dialects of Polish. This account has two parts: first, I will demonstrate that the attested gradiency and variability in realization of palatalized labials result from dialect-specific gestural interpretations of the same phonological representation; then, I will show that these patterns of realization...