The present article presents a study of the raising of overlong mid vowels in Estonian dialects. Long mid vowels of South Estonian dialects (Mulgi, Tartu and Võru) have split into full-long mid vowels (Q2) and into overlong raised mid vowels (Q3). Raising of mid vowels also characterises West Estonian dialects. The formant values of raised mid vowels of Võru and Mulgi show that they are much hi...

This paper reports the successful completion of Japanese POLYPHONE project, Voice Across Japan (VAJ) data collection project. The database has the following characteristic, 1) large speakers database (8,866 spk.) through telephone line, 2) to gather participant's personal information such as gender, age, growing place, and so on, and 3) to put data segmented by phone or word boundary. This pape...

In this paper, multidialectal acoustic modeling based on sharing data across dialects is addressed. A comparative study of different methods of combining data based on decision tree clustering algorithms is presented. Approaches evolved differ in the way of evaluating the similarity of sounds between dialects, and the decision tree structure applied. Proposed systems are tested with Spanish dia...

Quantitative analysis of fundamental frequency (F0) contours in yes/no-questions and coordinated questions, are compared across eight Arabic dialects, based on scripted role play data from the Intonational Variation in Arabic corpus [1]. Visualisation of the F0 contour of all tokens is used to evaluate how consistently speakers produce a typical contour in each dialect, for each question type. ...

Many bird species, especially song birds but also for instance some hummingbirds and parrots, have noted dialects. By this we mean that locally a particular song is sung by the majority of the birds, but that neighbouring patches may feature different song types. Behavioural ecologists have been interested in how such dialects come about and how they are maintained for over 45 years. As a resul...

This paper considers the hypothesis that dialects may have characteristic patterns in the alignment of the melodic contour with the segmental or syllabic tiers. Peak alignment was measured in initial prenuclear accented syllables for 3 dialects of Connaught Irish, Cois Fharraige, Inis-Oirr and Mayo. The size of the anacrusis varied as between two (PN2), one (PN1) and no (PN0) unstressed syllabl...

Some of the most salient differences among Arabic vernaculars have to do with syllable structure. This study focuses on the syllabification patterns of three dialect groups, (1) VC-dialects, (2) C-dialects, and (3) CV-dialects,1 and argues that they differ in the licencing of SEMISYLLABLES, moras unaffiliated with syllables and adjoined to higher prosodic constituents. The analysis provides som...

Problem statement: In modern speech communication at low bit rate, speech coding deteriorates the characteristics of the coded speech significantly. Considering the dialects in Thai, the coding quality of four main dialects spoken by Thai people residing in four core region including central, north, northeast and south regions has not been studied. Approach: This study presents a comparative st...

This paper investigates the perception of grammatical number in two Limburgian dialects of Dutch, Roermond and Weert, as a function of focus and intonational context. In these dialects, number can be marked segmentally or prosodically. The Roermond dialect, but not the Weert dialect, appears to neutralize the prosodic distinction outside the focus constituent in IP-internal syllables. We explai...

T HE consonant systems of the Scottish Gaelic dialects, 1 on account of the manner in which they have evolved, often present interesting contrasts to those of Irish dialects, most notably with regard to the plosive consonants. A recent article by MM airt n O Murchh u (l985:195{ 8) demonstrated how the origins of one particular sound change may sometimes be usefully looked for in the eeects of a...