Proverbs are usually regarded as structurally fixed expressions. However, in daily communication, language users often change them to suit their communicative purposes many ways, resulting proverb variations. Using the data from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA corpus), this study attempts present varieties “There two sides every coin” and explain variations perspective linguistic ...

This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that...

Despite the mounting evidence that variation and variability play an important role in spoken language processing, few speech researchers have investigated the relationship between dialect variation and human speech perception. Sociolinguists, on the other hand, have extensively documented linguistic variation and its social implications, but have largely ignored how dialect variation is percei...

Dialogue systems are artefacts that converse with human users in order to achieve some task. Each step of the dialogue requires understanding the user’s input, deciding on what to reply, and generating an output utterance. Although there are many ways to express any given content, most dialogue systems do not take linguistic variation into account in both the understanding and generation phases...

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic pa...