-The responsiveness of female White-crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys nuttalli) to male songs in their natal dialect (Clear) or in an alien dialect (Buzzy) was evaluated by measuring string-gathering and papershredding in a laboratory experiment. Females hearing Clear dialect songs gathered more strings than did females hearing Buzzy dialect songs. More females hearing Buzzy songs shredd...

We investigate national dialect identification, the task of classifying English documents according to their country of origin. We use corpora of known national origin as a proxy for national dialect. In order to identify general (as opposed to corpus-specific) characteristics of national dialects of English, we make use of a variety of corpora of different sources, with inter-corpus variation ...

Perceptual and acoustic research on dialect variation in the United States requires an appropriate corpus of spoken language materials. Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker. The Nationwide Speech Project corpus was designed to contain a large amount of speech produc...

The present study explores the phonetic implementation of accentual H(igh) tone of the Akita dialect of Japanese, specifically its timing control. Lexical accent in the dialect is implemented as an eminence in F0. The conspicuous feature is that F0 does not fall sharply as in Tokyo Japanese. Two hypotheses are examined concerning the extent of the duration of the pitch summit. One is that the H...

In dialectometry several approaches exist to automatically generate dialect maps on the basis of calculated dissimilarities between locations (using survey data). Examples for Dutch are Heeringa (2004), who calculates dialect maps on the basis of aggregated phonetic dissimilarities, and Spruit (2008), who calculates dialect maps on the basis of aggregated syntactic dissimilarities. In both exam...

Based on the definition of the relative clause from Song (2001), this paper examines the relative clause in the Hui’an dialect from four parameters: (a) the relativization marker used; (b) the position of the head noun relative to the restricting clause; (c) the role and encoding of the head noun in the restricting clause; and (d) the role and encoding of the head noun in the main clause. The H...

This study investigates how onset and sentence positioning affect the realization of Tone 1 in two dialects of Taiwan Mandarin. Results showed that the central dialect was higher in register when placed in isolation, but lower when placed in a sentential context. When there was a tonal mismatch, coarticulatory effects were more robust in the northern dialect, implying that speakers of the centr...

Vocalization, diactritization or diacritics restoration is one of the major challenges in Arabic natural language processing. Algiers dialect is also concerned by this issue. In this paper, we present an automatic diacritization system for standard and dialect Arabic texts based on statistical approach. The idea is to use available tools in statistical machine translation to build such a system...