The study is part of a series of studies which examine the acoustic correlates of lexical stress in several typologically different languages, in three speech styles: spontaneous speech, phrase reading, and wordlist reading. This study focuses on Czech, a language with stress fixed on the first syllable of a prosodic word, with no contrastive function at the level of individual words. The acous...

Lexical-semantic resources are used extensively for applied semantic inference, yet a clear quantitative picture of their current utility and limitations is largely missing. We propose systemand application-independent evaluation and analysis methodologies for resources’ performance, and systematically apply them to seven prominent resources. Our findings identify the currently limited recall o...

the present paper aims to examine the role of frequency lexicon in assessing lexical proficiency of persian learners. addressing the frequency distribution pattern of persian words, the research which is conducted in corpus-based method studies the relationship between words and lexical proficiency as well as derives the frequency lexicon from persian corpus. to do so, formal and colloquial per...

This study investigated the developmental change in the phonetic realization of English stress, using corpus data of Japanese English learners with varying proficiency. Previous studies demonstrated that highly proficient Japanese learners of English can produce native-like English lexical stress in terms of intensity, F0, and vowel duration, but not vowel quality. The results of our study show...

Prosodic features are important for the intelligibility and proficiency of stress-timed languages such as English and Arabic. Producing the appropriate lexical stress is challenging for second language (L2) learners, in particular, those whose first language (L1) is a syllable-timed language such as Spanish, French, etc. In this paper we introduce a method for automatic classification of lexica...

Despite its presence in all natural languages, importance for intelligibility, pivotal role during language acquisition and significance as a marker of language dysfunction, prosodic processing has been largely neglected in cognitive science. Here we examined hemispheric specialisation for linguistic word-level prosody, in particular, stress typicality, using dichotic listening. In Experiment 1...

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...