SEAME (South East Asia Mandarin-English) is a 30 hours spontaneous Mandarin-English code-switching speech corpus recorded from Singapore and Malaysia speakers. In this paper, we report a series of analyses on the recording, processing time and voice activity rate (VAR) of the speech recording, transcription, validation and language boundaries labeling processes. In addition, the duration of the...

Bilingual speakers often have less language experience compared to monolinguals as a result of speaking two languages and/or a later age of acquisition of the second language. This may result in weaker and less precise phonological representations of words in memory, which may cause greater retrieval effort during spoken word recognition. To gauge retrieval effort, the present study compared th...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of using linguistic information for improvement of statistical machine translation for English-Persian language pair. We choose POS tags as helping linguistic feature. A monolingual Persian corpus with POS tags is prepared and variety of tags is chosen to be small. Using the POS tagger trained on this corpus, we apply a factored translation model. We al...

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The amb...

condolence is part of austin’s expressive speech act and is related to searle’s behabitives illocutionary act. although a theoretically sound issue in pragmatics, condolence speech act has not been investigated as much as other speech acts in discourse-related studies. this paper aims at investigating interjections and intensifiers while performing condolence speech act among persian and englis...

tsimpli and dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (l2) acquisition after the critical period. in this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from persian speaking learners of english as an l2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (rps) as uniterpretable features. unlike english which does not allow rps, persian shows various b...

this study was an attempt to shed light on the use of requestive speech act by iranian nonnative speakers (nnss) of english and canadian native speakers (nss) of english to find out the (possible) similarities and/or differences between the request realizations, and to investigate the influence of the situational variables of power, distance, context familiarity, and l1’s (possible) influence. ...