PURPOSE This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young African American English (AAE)-speaking children's understanding and awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE). METHOD Eighty-three 4- to 8-year-old AAE-speaking children participated in 2 experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between MAE an...

This paper investigated how dialectal variations can influence the realization of tonal register and declination pattern in Taiwan Mandarin. Twelve speakers, six from the Northern dialect (standard) and six from the Central dialect (nonstandard), were recruited for a reading task. Target syllables of Tone 1 (T1) were embedded in a carrier sentence in three different sentential positions, initia...

Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may l...

This paper investigates the tonal pattern of mono-syllabic and the tone sandhi pattern of disyllable of Linyi dialect through the method of experimental phonetics. Previous studies provided the five-scale value of four citation tones and some of the features of tone sandhi of Linyi dialect. Further experimental data is needed to confirm these results, and to verify the tone sandhi patterns. Fir...

Dialect variations of a language have a severe impact on the performance of speech systems. Therefore, knowing how close or separate dialects are in a given language space provides useful information to predict, or improve, system performance when there is a mismatch between train and test data. Distance measures have been used in several applications of speech processing, including speech reco...

In this paper we address the problem of the analysis of multi-dialect Arabic morphology. Our method involves based on the synthesis of two methods. The first method is linguistic based, using an adopted Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Morphology Analyser to first deal with dialect prefixes and suffixes and then analyse the words. This method improves accuracy of dialect words by 69%. The second me...

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...

Data acquisition in dialectology is typically a tedious task, as dialect samples of spoken language have to be collected via questionnaires or interviews. In this article, we suggest to use the “web as a corpus” approach for dialectology. We present a case study that demonstrates how authentic language data for the Bavarian dialect (ISO 639-3:bar) can be collected automatically from the social ...