This paper, based on a phonetic experiment, depicts a contrastive study on the rhythmic pattern of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (CL2) as compared with that of the native speakers of both standard British and American English (EL1) in their respective pitch accent distribution patterns, prosodic structures and duration patterns.

Statistical error Correction technique is the most accurate and widely used approach today, but for a language like Sindhi which is a low resourced language the trained corpora’s are not available, so the statistical techniques are not possible at all. Instead a useful alternative would be to exploit various spelling error trends in Sindhi by using a Rule based approach. For designing such tech...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...

A pre-vocalic connected speech context is said to enable the resyllabification of word-final consonants into an onset, thus conditioning alternations. We present EPG data on English word-final /l/, measuring the extent of alveolar contact and the rate of vocalisation, the extent of dorsal retraction (representing ‘‘darkness’’), and the timing of alveolar contact relative to dorsal retraction. T...

The prevalence of lead in Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) occurring within the recent historical range of the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) was determined by analyzing blood samples from 162 Golden Eagles captured between June 1985 and December 1986 at three sites. We found no significant differences between sex and age classes in blood lead levels nor were there differences bet...

We describe observations from studies conducted with school children in Nepal and Portugal with the aim of exploring two questions: 1. Can we develop an interactive game that will continue to engage the child in gameplay when the electricity supply fails? 2. What are the discernable differences in the ways children in Nepal and Portugal interact with the game given the huge socio-economic and c...

Since the 1990s, the Brown ‘family’ corpora have been widely used for various diachronic studies of 20th century English language. However, the existing methodologies failed to exploit its full potential as they only used the four main text categories. In this paper, we present the results of two experiments on diachronic changes of the Coleman-Liau readability Index (CLI) in British and Americ...

Writing English is a big barrier for most Chinese users. To build a computer-aided system that helps Chinese users not only on spelling checking and grammar checking but also on writing in the way of native-English is a challenging task. Although machine translation is widely used for this purpose, how to find an efficient way in which human collaborates with computers remains an open issue. In...

In this paper, we describe issues in the translation of proper names from English to Chinese which we have faced in constructing a system for multilingual text generation supporting both languages. We introduce an algorithm for mapping from English names to Chinese characters based on (1) heuristics about relationships between English spelling and pronunciation, and (2) consistent relationships...