Nonverbal vocalizations in dementia are important clinically since they generally have been regarded as disruptive behavior that is disturbing. The aim of the present study is to describe the interactional pattern, including the prosodic package, of nonverbal vocalizations in a participant in a late stage of dementia. The acoustic analysis shows that the vocalizations do not differ significantl...

Speech segmentation is the problem of finding word boundaries in spoken language when the underlying vocabulary is still unknown. Here we show that a system with no phonemic knowledge can find word boundaries. The system first subdivides an utterance by recursively clustering similar parts of the signal together until the cepstral coefficient variance is low within each new segment. These segme...

Identifier names are the principal means of recording and communicating ideas in source code and are a significant source of information for software developers and maintainers, and the tools that support their work. This research aims to increase understanding of identifier name content types — words, abbreviations, etc. — and phrasal structures — noun phrases, verb phrases, etc. — by improvin...

This study is concerned with the use of specific tools from Mikhail Bakhtin’s comprehensive literary work in order to investigate the notion of time/space in Bahram Beyzaie’s 1979 movie, The Crow. Employing the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope in the analysis of the movie as a cinematic text proves helpful in developing the notion of anachronotopicity, which is then utilized to investigate the w...

This article discusses the reasons why Chinese learners of English avoid using phrasal verbs in an English community context or when using English as an interlanguage in China. The avoidance of phrasal verbs often leads to ineffective communication. By adopting appropriate pedagogical and methodological approaches or providing proper guidance to learning, Chinese learners of English may achieve...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

0. Introduction This study examines the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence as perceived by a large number of native listeners of American English who are naïve to the phonetics and phonology of prosody. In English, as in other stress languages, speech utterances are chunked into smaller prosodic phrases, and within a prosodic phrase some words are assigned phrasal stress, which typicall...