Phonological differences between regional dialects of American English are well established in the sociolinguistics literature. The perception of these phonological differences by naïve listeners is much less well understood, however. Using an existing corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct regional dialects in the United States, an acoustic analysis was conduc...

Cultural evolution is an important force in creating and maintaining behavioral variation in some species. Vocal dialects have provided a useful model for the study of cultural evolution and its interactions with genetic evolution. This study examined the acoustic and geographic changes in vocal dialects over an eleven-year span in the yellow-naped amazon, Amazona auropalliata, in Costa Rica. C...

In China, there are hundred kinds of dialects. By traditional dialectology, they are classified into seven big dialect regions and most of them also have many sub-dialects and sub-subdialects. As they are different in various linguistic aspects, people from different dialect regions often cannot communicate orally. But for the sub-dialects of one dialect region, although they are sometimes stil...

DEDICATION I would like to dedicate my thesis and give thanks to my family especially my brother, who have always support and encourage me whenever it is needed. I also want to give thanks to my friends, who have helped me with the data collection in parts of this work. Without the support of my family and friends, this work would not have made possible. Many thanks, to my family and friends. v...

since the true understanding of each dialect depends on an understanding of language changes, this paper discusses the historical course of language in egypt and the linguistic features of the egyptian dialect based on historical linguistics. what this paper takes into consideration is the presence of arabic in egypt before the advent of islam and discusses the extent of its impression from the...

In this paper, we present our recent work in the analysis and modeling of speech under dialect. Dialect and accent significantly influence automatic speech recognition performance, and therefore it is critical to detect and classify non-native speech. In this study, we consider three areas that include: (i) prosodic structure (normalized f0, syllable rate, and sentence duration), (ii) phoneme a...

Cross-generational and cross-dialectal variation in vowels among speakers of American English was examined in terms of vowel identification by listeners and vowel classification using pattern recognition. Listeners from Western North Carolina and Southeastern Wisconsin identified 12 vowel categories produced by 120 speakers stratified by age (old adults, young adults, and children), gender, and...

Whether using two languages enhances executive functions is a matter of debate. Here, we take a novel perspective to examine the bilingual advantage hypothesis by comparing bi-dialect with mono-dialect speakers' performance on a non-linguistic task that requires executive control. Two groups of native Chinese speakers, one speaking only the standard Chinese Mandarin and the other also speaking ...

This paper presents a wide literature review of natural language processing for dialectical Arabic. Four main research areas were identified and the dialect coverage in research work was outlined. The paper can be used as a quick reference to identify relevant contributions that address a specific NLP aspect for a specific dialect.