In this paper we discuss intercultural communication using the notions of high-context and low-context cultures. Using examples from English and Finnish conversations, we exemplify dialogue strategies and relative speaker and hearer responsibilities via three conversational aspects: anaphoric references, topic introduction, and disjunctive questions. The examples show different interpretations ...

PURPOSE English and Mandarin are the 2 most spoken languages in the world, yet it is not known how stuttering manifests in English-Mandarin bilinguals. In this research, the authors investigated whether the severity and type of stuttering is different in English and Mandarin in English-Mandarin bilinguals, and whether this difference was influenced by language dominance. METHOD Thirty English...

In this paper, we present a summa.rization system for spontaneous dialogues which consists of a novel multi-stage architectm'e. It is specifically aimed at addressing issues related to tlle nature of the l;exts being spoken vs. written and being diMogical vs. monologica.l. The system is embedded in a. graphical user interface ~md was developed and tested on transcripts of recorded telephone con...

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non-human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differ...

Our method for multi-lingual geoparsing uses monolingual tools and resources along with machine translation and alignment to return location words in many languages. Not only does our method save the time and cost of developing geoparsers for each language separately, but also it allows the possibility of a wide range of language capabilities within a single interface. We evaluated our method i...

This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); an...

This paper describes, within the context of the DARPA EARS program, the design and implementation of the Fisher protocol for collecting conversational telephone speech which has yielded more than 16,000 English conversations. It also discusses the Quick Transcription specification that allowed 2000 hours of Fisher audio to be transcribed in less than one year. Fisher data is already in use with...

A literacy-related activity that occurs in children's homes-talk about letters in everyday conversations-was examined using data from 50 children who were visited every 4 months between 14 and 50 months. Parents talked about some letters, including those that are common in English words and the first letter of their children's names, especially often. Parents' focus on the child's initial was e...