We describe here our approach to quantifying cross-dialect differences in Irish Gaelic, using the Fujisaki model. The basic principle is that the way in which the modelling is carried out respects a parallel linguistic (AM) analysis. The aims are: (1) to ensure that our modelling strategies permit a reliable cross-dialect comparison, (2) that the model-derived measurements can be related to mea...

Abstract Every day people see, describe, and remember motion events. However, the relation between multimodal encoding of events in speech gesture, memory is not yet fully understood. Moreover, whether language typology modulates this remains to be tested. This study investigates type event information (path or manner) mentioned gesture predicts which remembered varies across speakers typologic...

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

Entrainment is the propensity of speakers to begin behaving like one another in conversation. We identify evidence of entrainment in a number of acoustic and prosodic dimensions in conversational speech of Standard American English speakers and Mandarin Chinese speakers. We compare entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and the Tongji Games Corpus and find similar patterns of global and local...

We examined the relationship between spatial language and spatial memory by comparing native English, Japanese, and Korean speakers' naming of spatial locations and their spatial memory for the same set of locations. We focused on two kinds of spatial organization: axial structure of the reference object, and contact/support with respect to its surface. The results of two language (naming) task...

This paper aims at effectively identifying common English mispronunciations by Mandarin speakers and incorporating this knowledge into computer assisted language learning (CALL) to improve the learner’s accented English. For this purpose, English and Mandarin multi-channel EMA articulatory datasets collected from native English and native Mandarin speakers respectively have been used to uncover...

Many readers will be familiar with the quantitative and distributional techniques of register analysis presented by Biber (1988). The present book re-uses this earlier study on variation in British English [henceforth El, along with "a synthesis" (p. xv) of Ph.D. studies done with Biber at the University of Southern California: by Niko Besnier on Nukulaelae Tuvaluan IT], Mohamed Hared on Somali...