This study investigates the relative effects of talker-specific variation and dialect-based variation on speech intelligibility. Listeners from two dialects of American English performed speech-in-noise tasks with sentences spoken by talkers of each dialect. An initial statistical model showed no significant effects for either talker or listener dialect group, and no interaction. However, a mix...

Two experiments examined whether American and British university students make different kinds of spelling errors as a function of the differences between their dialects. The American students spoke a rhotic dialect, pronouncing an /r/ in such words as leper, hermit, horde, and gnarl. The British students, with their nonrhotic dialect, did not include an /r/ in such words. The dialect differenc...

In this paper we present some results stemming from a British Academy funded grant,1 the objective of which was to determine the extent of dialect variation in relative clause constructions in Scottish Gaelic and to provide a theoretical explanation for the structures discovered. The more theoretical outcomes of the project are reported in Adger and Ramchand (2002) and Adger and Ramchand (2005)...

This article reports first results of a quantity typology study of Swedish dialects, conducted within the Swedia2000 project (see also www.swedia.nu). The examination of recordings from 20 different areas suggests three preliminary types of quantity distinctions: one type shows the usual Swedish complementary quantity distinction, one type uses an additional quantity pattern and one type shows ...

Arabic is a language with great dialectal variety, with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) being the only standardized dialect. Spoken Arabic is characterized by frequent code-switching between MSA and Dialectal Arabic (DA). DA varieties are typically differentiated by region, but despite their wide-spread usage, they are under-resourced and lack viable corpora and tools necessary for speech recognit...

In the Arab world, while Modern Standard Arabic is commonly used in formal written context, on sites like Youtube, people are increasingly using Dialectal Arabic, the language for everyday use to comment on a video and interact with the community. These user-contributed comments along with the video and user attributes, offer a rich source of multi-dialectal Arabic sentences and expressions fro...

Amajor problem with dialectal Arabic acoustic modeling is due to the very sparse available speech resources. In this paper, we have chosen Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) as a typical dialect. In order to benefit from existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) resources, a cross-lingual acoustic modeling approach is proposed that is based on supervised model adaptation. MSA acoustic models were ada...

Dialectal Arabic (DA) refers to the day-to-day vernaculars spoken in the Arab world. DA lives side-by-side with the official language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). DA differs from MSA on all levels of linguistic representation, from phonology and morphology to lexicon and syntax. Unlike MSA, DA has no standard orthography since there are no Arabic dialect academies, nor is there a large edited...