This paper presents the results of experiments in which machine learning techniques were applied to the problem of determining regional dialect boundaries. Specifically, decision trees classification and k-means clustering were applied to a corpus of phonetic measurements taken from a large survey of North American English vowels. Pairwise classification and clustering experiments were done for...

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...

In this paper, we introduce a dialect recognition method that makes use of phonetic models adapted per dialect without phonetically labeled data. We show that this method can be implemented efficiently within an existing PRLM[1] system. We compare the performance of this system with other state-of-theart dialect recognition methods (both acoustic and token-based) on the NIST LRE 2007 English an...

Socioperceptual research has shown that speech perception can be biased by the perceived dialect of a speaker. While these studies have focused on vowels, the current study investigates whether fricative perception exhibits similar dialect effects. The Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast, often used for distinguishing between Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin, was the manipulated feature. When prese...

This paper describes a methodology, and the results stemming from it, for analysing the dynamic encoding of speaker identity and dialect in prosodic parameters. A method based on employing properties of the well known Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm’s path of best match allows the separation of purely dynamic from static properties of acoustic parameters and hence their evaluation as to dy...

This mutual intelligibility study contains a production and perception experiment on English vowels by Chinese learners. In the production experiment, 45 male first-year Chinese college students were recorded. They hailed from nine different dialectal backgrounds (three supergroups), with five speakers per dialect group. The stimuli were , , , , , , , and ...

Automatic dialect classification has gained interests in the field of speech research because it is important to characterize speaker traits and to estimate knowledge that could improve integrated speech technology (e.g., speech recognition, speaker recognition). This study addresses novel advances in unsupervised spontaneous Latin American Spanish dialect classification. The problem considers ...

Dialect recognition is a challenging and multifaceted problem. Distinguishing between dialects can rely upon many tiers of interpretation of speech data—e.g., prosodic, phonetic, spectral, and word. High-accuracy automatic methods for dialect recognition typically use either phonetic or spectral characteristics of the input. A challenge with spectral system, such as those based on shifted-delta...

h?r?m? is a g?r?n? dialect and subset of g?r?n?-z?z? linguistic branch and is considered as one of northwest iranian dialects. h?r?m? is a preserved dialect and have preserved the archaic phonetic and inflective characteristics, so etymological study of this dialect leads to considerable points in more accurate identification of iranian languages. in this article, etymological study of some ver...