In this paper we evaluate two different methods for the visual synthesis of Austrian German dialects with parametric HiddenSemi-Markov-Model (HSMM) based speech synthesis. One method uses visual dialect data, i.e. visual dialect recordings that are annotated with dialect phonetic labels, the other methods uses a standard visual model and maps dialect phones to standard phones. This second metho...

L1 transfer may be able to explain prosodic errors in an L2. For Japanese English prosody, several comparative studies have been conducted. Despite this, only oral reading texts have been used in previous studies and not much attention has been paid to the effect of differences in the L1 dialect, especially in the case of an “accentless” Japanese dialect. This preliminary study describes an inv...

Clean speech data is necessary for spoken language processing, however, there is no public Japanese dialect corpus collected for speech processing. Parallel speech corpora of dialect are also important because real dialect affects each other, however, the existing data only includes noisy speech data of dialects and their translation in common language. In this paper, we collected parallel spee...

A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match...

Traditional dialect maps are based on data from carefully selected informants which usually results in clear-cut dialect borders, isoglosses, with one dialect characteristic present on one side of the isogloss and absent on the other. We illustrate some of the problems and pitfalls connected with using dialect maps for ASR by comparing results from traditional dialect research with investigatio...

Phase Change Memory (PCM) may become a viable alternative for the design of main memory systems in the next few years. However PCM suffers from limited write endurance. Therefore future adoption of PCM as a technology for main memory will depend on the availability of practical solutions for wear leveling that avoids uneven usage especially in the presence of potentially malicious users. First ...

Vertical geodesy is undergoing a revolution because of two factors. First, new precise three-dimensional position measurement techniques used over very long distances and based on extraterrestrial reference systems provide a new class and precision of geometric data previously unavailable for geophysical investigations. Second, physical models in tectonic theory for large earthquakes predict cr...

1. Introduction In traditional dialectology, dialect variation is often represented by areas within which similar dialects are spoken. The dialect areas are found by drawing dividing lines (isoglosses) between areas where different representations are found for selected linguistic variables. However, different isoglosses do not always coincide which makes it difficult to draw borders between th...