background: among the infectious organisms of parasitic origin, gastrointestinal nematodes are very important as they have been reported worldwide. the main aim of the present research study to highlight the annual epidemiological contributing factors associated with the prevalence of gastrointestinal nematodes and their control in sheep. methods: a total 1200 faecal samples (100 per month) wer...

We adopt automatic language recognition methods to study dialect levelling — a phenomenon that leads to reduced structural differences among dialects in a given spoken language. In terms of dialect characterisation, levelling is a nuisance variable that adversely affects recognition accuracy: the more similar two dialects are, the harder it is to set them apart. We address levelling in Finnish ...

The Continental West Germanic Languages include the standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and High German, as well as a large number of non-standard varieties, the more familiar of which are the dialects spoken in Belgium and the South of the Netherlands (Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgian), Northern Germany (Low German), the Rhine Valley (Luxemburgish), South-Eastern Germany and Austria (e.g. Bav...

Arabic dialects do not just share a common koiné, but there are shared pandialectal linguistic phenomena that allow computational models for dialects to learn from each other. In this paper we build a unified segmentation model where the training data for different dialects are combined and a single model is trained. The model yields higher accuracies than dialect-specific models, eliminating t...

This is apreliminary report on the phonetic interaction of tone and consonant voicing in K m u , a language where some dialects use Fo for producing distinctive word tones, while others do not have tones but rely on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which tonal dialects distinguishes with tones. Speakers of non-tonal dialects produce no significant Fo diflerence...

Previous studies on the perception of language prosody and dialectal prosody have shown that languages and regional dialects can be identified by prosodic cues alone. This pilot study tests this for 4 Swiss German dialects. 70 subjects are presented with filtered speech material, devoid of segmental cues. The filter was applied for frequencies between 250 Hz7000 Hz. Despite this filtering, 3 of...

This thematic issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language addresses the question of whether dialects in western Europe are dying. Can dialects still be a medium of communication in our industrialized and increasingly urbanized societies? Is there a place for dialects in a globalizing world? And what kind of dialect do we speak right now and shall we be speaking in the near f...

This thesis has two aims: developing resources for Arabic dialects and improving the speech recognition of Arabic dialects. Two important components are considered: Pronunciation Dictionary (PD) and Language Model (LM). Six parts are involved, which relate to finding and evaluating dialects resources and improving the performance of systems for the speech recognition of dialects. Three resource...

In the dialects of Japanese spoken in the city of Fukuoka, there are two ways in which the prosodic phonology of nouns differs from that of verbs and adjectives. First, verbs have an obligatory pitch accent, while nouns may be accented or unaccented. These dialects thus differ from dialects such as Tôkyô (McCawley 1968; Poser 1984), in which a word of any category may be either accented or unac...