We present a novel approach for (written) dialect identification based on the discriminative potential of entire words. We generate Swiss German dialect words from a Standard German lexicon with the help of hand-crafted phonetic/graphemic rules that are associated with occurrence maps extracted from a linguistic atlas created through extensive empirical fieldwork. In comparison with a character...

The developmental properties of vowel devoicing were investigated for 72 children of 4 and 5 years of age, and 37 adults in two dialects of Japanese. One was the Osaka dialect, with a low devoicing rate, and the other the Tokyo dialect, with a high devoicing rate. In the Tokyo dialect, the devoicing rate of children significantly increased and reached an adult-like level by the age of 5 years, ...

An HMM-based speech synthesis framework is applied to both Standard Austrian German and a Viennese dialectal variety and several training strategies for multi-dialect modeling such as dialect clustering and dialect-adaptive training are investigated. For bridging the gap between processing on the level of HMMs and on the linguistic level, we add phonological transformations to the HMM interpola...

The present study introduces articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a promising method to the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation across dozens of speakers....

due to the close proximity of mazanadaran and russia there have always been considerable language contacts between the two regions. for example , in mazandarani dialect there have been numerous loanwords borrowed from russian language , while they are not in use in standard persian or its other dialects . this paper will examine these type of loanwords . they are occasionally imported with a di...

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...

during spring, summer and winter seasons, sistani donor cows, with normal reproductive status, were superovulated and embryos were recovered non-surgically on day 7. grade a blastocyst embryos were either transferred fresh (spring) or frozen (summer and winter). recovered embryos during summer and winter were exposed to glycerol and frozen using conventional method. during spring season, recipi...

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...