Nigerian English like a variety of world Englishes has received scholarly investigations at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. At level, studies on major varieties have identified characteristic nature stress assignment interactions, but little or no research explored loanwords in English. The study examines placements among educated Igbo Yoruba speakers A well-prepared text was read by s...

Disyllabic Norwegian words characteristically have an initial syllable which is stressed and heavy and a final syllable which is unstressed and light. Adopting a moraic theory of syllabic representation, the weight of the initial syllable can be realized either with a bimoraic vowel or with a monomoraic vowel followed by a moraic consonant. Monosyllabic words also show variation in the length o...

The quality of an epenthetic vowel in a particular language may vary depending on segmental and prosodic factors, such as the quality of the surrounding consonants, the quality of other vowels in the word, and the position of the epenthetic vowel within the word. This last factor has received little attention in the literature. I have identified a number of cases in Italian in which the quality...

This paper presents an unsupervised method for developing a character-based n-gram classifier that identifies loanwords or transliterated foreign words in Korean text. The classifier is trained on an unlabeled corpus using the Expectation Maximization algorithm, building on seed words extracted from the corpus. Words with high token frequency serve as native seed words. Words with seeming trace...

This paper provides an overview of theoretical and experimental investigations of voiced geminates in Japanese. Active discussion was initiated by Nishimura’s (2003) discovery that in Japanese loanword phonology, voiced geminates can be devoiced, when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → /dokku/). This context-sensitive devoicing of geminates has received much theoretical...

Neural machine translation (NMT) models typically operate with a fixed vocabulary, but translation is an open-vocabulary problem. Previous work addresses the translation of out-of-vocabulary words by backing off to a dictionary. In this paper, we introduce a simpler and more effective approach, making the NMT model capable of open-vocabulary translation by encoding rare and unknown words as seq...