The daily spoken variety of Arabic is often termed the colloquial or dialect form of Arabic. There are many Arabic dialects across the Arab World and within other Arabic speaking communities. These dialects vary widely from region to region and to a lesser extent from city to city in each region. The dialects are not standardized, they are not taught, and they do not have official status. Howev...

Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development. Behavioral data show that use of the alternat...

Within Model Driven Development (MDD), state machines are a common mechanism for modelling behaviour. The development of a formal semantics for state machines continues to be a very active and important area of research, because the development of interoperating MDD tools requires a precise, unambiguous, yet readable account of the meaning of the diagrams. Research on state machine semantics is...

Gambel's white-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii, is a long-distance migrant that, in contrast to other subspecies of white-crowned sparrow, does not form vocal dialects. I studied the process of vocal development in the field and laboratory to determine how it differed from the process in three other subspecies previously studied. Four common song types existed in a random spati...

In this article, we review three responses to the study and evaluation of grammar in children who speak nonmainstream dialects of English. Then we introduce a fourth, system-based response that views nonmainstream dialects of English, such as African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as made up of dialect-specific and dialect-universal features. To illustrate the usefulnes...