This work discusses the syllable structure of Al-Ahsa dialect of Arabic. Al-Ahsa dialect is a variation of Arabic spoken in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. An OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) framework is adopted and provides a complete analysis of the syllable structure found in the dialect under discussion. It is concluded that Al-Ahsa dialect prohibits initial consonant clusters bu...

The purpose of this article is to determine the phonemic status of [h] and [ʔ] in the Sistani dialect of Miyankangi. Auditory tests applied to the relevant data show that [ʔ] occurs mainly in word-initial position, where it stands in free variation with Ø. The only place where [h] is heard is in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and only in the pronunciation of some speakers who are educated and/or...

This study tested whether estimated speaker age influences estimated dialect strength. Twenty young listeners judged unscripted monologues in terms of speaker age and dialect strength. The speech samples were produced by 3 elderly men, 3 elderly women, 3 young men and 3 young women, all native speakers of the Arjeplog dialect. In addition to the original speech samples, manipulated versions wer...

In this paper, we show how adaptive modeling within the statistical parametric speech synthesis framework can be applied to Albanian dialects. We develop speaker dependent voices for the Tosk and Gheg dialect and adapt models for the Gheg dialect from the Tosk models. We show that the adapted Gheg models outperform the speaker dependent Gheg model on an intelligibility and dialect classificatio...

Dialect loss is a relatively new but by now quite general phenomenon in Flanders (i.e., Dutch-speaking Belgium). Although the processes of dialect change and dialect loss have proceeded with great regional di¤erences in speed and intensity in the past decades, there is a general tendency toward replacing primary dialect features of a relatively local scope by secondary dialect features that hav...

22 Moving from a traditional dialect geography research methodology to one in which data are processed 23 electronically and where visualization is used as a research tool can be of great benefit to dialect geography. 24 A working environment offering full support for using visualization as a research tool could take dialect 25 geography into the era of eScience. Despite the advent of electroni...

The present paper conducts two experiments on the nasal coda performance in Hohhot dialect from a prosodic point of view. In the production experiment, acoustic characteristics of nasal codas in Hohhot dialect are shown in comparison with that in Mandarin Chinese in the dimensions of duration, fundamental frequency and intensity, which reveal that Hohhot dialect speakers cannot produce the nasa...

This paper describes a method for selecting an appropriate phone set in dialect speech synthesis for a so far undescribed dialect by applying hidden Markov model (HMM) based training and clustering methods. In this pilot study we show how a phone set derived from the phonetic surface can be optimized given a small amount of dialect speech training data.

On the connection of Kırcali (Gırcalı) sub-dialect with dialect Western Anatolia -based on data present tense suffix Meninski- Adamovic firstly drew attention. According to available data, Western-Anatolian region is not far from dialects middle Deliorman Region. As an example, we can show Edirne-Dağlı dialect, which located at East-Rumelia region. For example: {-(I)vAr(I)} shown as suffix. In ...