The present study employs phonetic means and LZ-Score values to systematically investigate and tonal patterns and the internal differences of tones in Shandong (Hereinafter, SD) dialect. The dialect regions selected in the study is Jinan, Liaocheng, Tai’an and Zibo, all of which belong to Xiqi district. Results demonstrate that all of the four regions deserve four tones, specifically, tonal val...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect...

Dialect stereotypes are widespread. Birmingham English is perceived as ugly, Parisian French as cultivated. In Switzerland, Bern and Thurgau Swiss German lie on opposite ends of the attractiveness spectrum. In the present study, we examined how Swiss German, French, and English listeners – the latter two being unfamiliar with the dialects – rated the phonetic aesthetics of these two Swiss Germa...

Linguistic experience has been shown to affect the perception of regional dialect variation. This pilot study examined the effect of familiarity on the perceived similarity of regional dialects. Native speakers of American English completed a paired comparison perceptual similarity rating task with a group of unfamiliar regional dialects. Speakers of American English were asked to make explicit...

The aim of the present study was to relate articulatory properties of the Polish sibilants /s ʂ ɕ/ to a potential neutralization of /ʂ/ as either /s/ or /ɕ/, the former having occurred in a number of Polish dialects. For this purpose tongue tip (TT) movement data was obtained together with acoustic data using electromagnetic articulography. The sibilants, that were always followed by either /a ...

In this paper, we describe the work on Chinese multi-dialect speech processing. Based on the phonetic analysis of ten Chinese dialects, we have created a Chinese super phonetic system for the Chinese speech recognition. To exam this phonetic system and develop Chinese dialect speech technology, we are building a multi-dialect speech corpus, which includes 10 dialect areas and 2000 speakers.

The present study adopts phonetic experiment to systematically investigate the citation tone and tone sandhi patterns of Liaocheng and Tai’an dialect. It aims to provide empirical data for the theoretical analysis and explore the diversities of tonal phenomenon within Shandong (Hereinafter, as SD) dialect. Results demonstrate that both of these two dialects have four citation tones, i.e., Tone ...

Does cultural similarity affect destination choices of foreign direct investment (FDI)? To answer this question, I provide a novel identification strategy which explores discontinuous changes in investment from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (HMT) to Mainland China at borders of Chinese dialect zones. Mainland China can be geographically separated into various dialect zones. People who speak the s...

Most studies on dialect acquisition have focused on the acquisition of lexical items and segmental phonology, while details of parental influence have been left on the backburner as a settled issue. Stanford (2008) showed that children acquire the local paternal dialect rather than the maternal dialect through the categorization of identity groups based on culture, but his study failed to inclu...

Naming as an inseparable sign of a country’s language has attracted the attention of many linguists to formulate and test hypotheses regarding the culture and language of the people of a certain area. Iran appears like a proper destination for conducting a research focusing on naming based on several factors such as geography or chronology. The present article aims to take a specific look at th...