This study compared acoustic characteristics of final stops in Korean and Thai. Word-final stops are phonetically realized as unreleased stops in these languages. Native speakers of Korean and Thai produced monosyllabic words ending with [p t k] in each of their native languages (L1). Formant frequencies of /i a u/ at the vowel’s offset were examined. In both languages, the place effect was sig...

To find a pleasant voice for speech synthesis is of vital importance to the system. In this study we investigated the influence of prosodic parameters on voice preference from a cross-linguistic perspective. We conducted two voice preference tests. 24 German and 50 Chinese listeners took part in the first test on German speaker selection; while 25 Chinese and 10 German listeners participated in...

Two series of Electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements indicated that average auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the disyllabic sound /asu/ were different between Japanese and English native listeners. Significant differences were observed in the time window where the P1-N1-P2 complex for /a/ is expected. This difference may be due to the absence/presence of the Auditory Change...

German and English speakers employ different strategies to encode static spatial scenes involving the axial position (standing vs. lying) of an inanimate figure object with respect to a ground object. In a series of three experiments, we show that this linguistic difference is not reflected in native speakers’ ability to detect changes in axial position in nonlinguistic memory tasks. Furthermor...

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthograph...

Creating knowledge bases based on the crowd-sourced wikis, like Wikipedia, has attracted significant research interest in the field of intelligent Web. However, the derived taxonomies usually contain many mistakenly imported taxonomic relations due to the difference between the user-generated subsumption relations and the semantic taxonomic relations. Current approaches to solving the problem s...

It is well established that speakers of Standard American English entrain, or become more similar to each other as they speak, in acoustic-prosodic features of their speech as well as other behaviors. Entrainment in other languages is less well understood. This work uses a variety of metrics to measure acoustic-prosodic entrainment in four comparable corpora of task-oriented conversational spee...

MuchMore provides a framework for integrating and refining existing technologies and developing new approaches to cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) for the medical domain. Existence of very large ontologies of domain concepts and extensive corpora for the medical domain has grounded the work toward refinement, integration and comparison of concept-based retrieval methods and corpora-ba...

The Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in children’s speech has attracted a great deal of attention due to its occurrence in a variety of languages (including English, Dutch and German), and its apparent absence in other languages (such as Spanish and Italian). Wexler (1998) explains this pattern of results in terms of a Unique Checking Constraint that interacts with cross-linguistic differenc...