This study compared cross-language speech perception of vowel length contrasts in Arabic and Japanese by two groups of listeners whose first language (L1) was either Cantonese (C) or Korean (K). Unlike Arabic or Japanese, C and K do not use vowel length contrastively. One group (CK+J) had experience learning Japanese as a foreign language while the other (CK) did not. The question of interest w...

OBJECTIVES To test the psychometric properties of an adapted Arabic version of the state trait anxiety-form Y (STAI-Y) in Saudi adult dental patients.  METHODS In this cross-sectional study, the published Arabic version of the STAI-Y was evaluated by 2 experienced bilingual professionals for its compatibility with Saudi culture and revised prior to testing. Three hundred and eighty-seven pati...

In this paper, we investigate different approaches in crowdsourcing transcriptions of Dialectal Arabic speech with automatic quality control to ensure good transcription at the source. Since Dialectal Arabic has no standard orthographic representation, it is very challenging to perform quality control. We propose a complete recipe for speech transcription quality control that includes using out...

BACKGROUND Patients with schizophrenia commonly show both depressive and negative symptoms that can differentially affect the prognosis and course of treatment. The Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS) was designed to distinguish between depression and negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. The purpose of this study is to validate an Arabic version of the CDSS among pati...

In this paper, we show the progress for Arabic speech recognition by incorporating contextual information into the process of morphological decomposition. The new approach achieves lower out-of-vocabulary and word error rates when compared to our previous work, in which the morphological decomposition relies on word-level information only. We also describe how the vocalization procedure is impr...

BACKGROUND Early recognition of dental fear is essential for the effective delivery of dental care. This study aimed to test the reliability and validity of the Arabic version of the Children's Fear Survey Schedule-Dental Subscale (CFSS-DS). METHODS A school-based sample of 1546 children was randomly recruited. The Arabic version of the CFSS-DS was completed by children during class time. The...

Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles, and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. However, in recent years, more nuanced studies of interand i...