The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegi...

In this paper building statistical language models for Persian language using a corpus and incorporating them in Persian continuous speech recognition (CSR) system are described. We used Persian Text Corpus for building the language models. First we preprocessed the texts of corpus by correcting the different orthography of words. Also, the number of POS tags was decreased by clustering POS tag...

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose dialects are very different from Standard German, the official language of the German part of Switzerland. However, dealing with Swiss German in natural language processing, usually the detour through Standard German is taken. As writing in Swiss German has become more and more popular in recent years, we would like to provide data to serve as a steppin...

Preaspiration is not unusual in connection with unvoiced consonants in Swedish. In all the 20 Northern Swedish dialects covered in this study unvoiced stops following stressed vowels are preaspirated to at least some extent, although preaspiration is not characteristic for all speakers. However, in two of the dialects preaspiration plays a more prominent and even normative role, being a means t...

Numerous studies have investigated the health problems reported by veterans of the Persian Gulf War, but important questions remain. Epidemiologic studies have consistently indicated that Gulf War veterans report unexplained symptoms at significantly higher rates than veteran comparison groups but that they have not experienced excess rates of disease-related mortality. Addressing unanswered qu...

The main concern of the present study was to compare Iranian monolingual and bilingual EFL students’ listening comprehension in terms of Latinized Persian subtitling of English movie to see whether there was a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals on immediate linguistic comprehension of the movie. Latinized Persian subtitling was representing Persian language in Latin scri...

Russian ( ), Persian ( ) and Siberian ( Acipenser gueldenstaedtii A. persicus A. ) sturgeons are closely related ‘Ponto-Caspian’ species. Investigation of baerii their population structure is an important problem, the solution of which determines measures for conservation of these species. According to previous studies, ‘baerii-like’ mitochondrial genotypes were found in the Caspian Sea among 3...

Although much has been written about the Gulf conflict, comparatively little attention has been paid to the medical aspects of the conflict and to the overall balance between the costs and benefits. As the situation continues to evolve in Iraq it becomes clearer that some of the short term effects of the war given so much publicity will be overshadowed by the medium and long term adverse conseq...