The present paper discusses the intonational features of 3 Swiss German dialects: Valais Swiss German (WS), representing the Alpine variety, and Zurich (ZH) and Berne (BE) Swiss German, representing the Midland dialects. By application of the Fujisaki intonation model, 24 speakers of the mentioned dialects are investigated according to their global as well as local intonational features. The BE...

Two studies provided direct support for a recently proposed dialect theory of communicating emotion, positing that expressive displays show cultural variations similar to linguistic dialects, thereby decreasing accurate recognition by out-group members. In Study 1, 60 participants from Quebec and Gabon posed facial expressions. Dialects, in the form of activating different muscles for the same ...

Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for interor intra-speaker variability. Speech data from the IViE corpus, however, demonstrate considerable variation in English intonation that occurs both across and within dialects (IViE = Intonational Variation in English, UK ESRC award R000237145, http://www.phon.ox.ac.k/~esther/ivyweb). In this paper, ...

This paper develops a new statistical method of building language models (LMs) of Japanese dialects for automatic speech recognition (ASR). One possible application is to recognize a variety of utterances in our daily lives. The most crucial problem in training language models for dialects is the shortage of linguistic corpora in dialects. Our solution is to transform linguistic corpora into di...

The present study investigated three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou, and Ningbo. It is found that, in all three dialects, focus is encoded by increasing the maximum F0 and duration of focused words, and lowering and compressing the F0 and pitch range of post-focus words. These results are consistent with previous findings about Wu dialect in Shanghai. Northern Wu dialects therefore seem to ...

The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegi...

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose dialects are very different from Standard German, the official language of the German part of Switzerland. However, dealing with Swiss German in natural language processing, usually the detour through Standard German is taken. As writing in Swiss German has become more and more popular in recent years, we would like to provide data to serve as a steppin...

Preaspiration is not unusual in connection with unvoiced consonants in Swedish. In all the 20 Northern Swedish dialects covered in this study unvoiced stops following stressed vowels are preaspirated to at least some extent, although preaspiration is not characteristic for all speakers. However, in two of the dialects preaspiration plays a more prominent and even normative role, being a means t...