kurmanji is probably the most well known variety of kurdish language. apart from such countries as turkey, iraq, syria, and some areas in western iran, it is spoken in khorasan-e shomali and khorasan-e razavi provinces in north-east iran. the residents of biglar –a village near quchan in north-west khorasan-e razavi province- as well as many other people living in the neighboring villages speak...

Written language is an evolutionarily recent human invention; consequently, its neural substrates cannot be determined by the genetic code. How, then, does the brain incorporate skills of this type? One possibility is that written language is dependent on evolutionarily older skills, such as spoken language; another is that dedicated substrates develop with expertise. If written language does d...

Tests of phonological awareness have been developed for spoken languages that require spoken responses. For many deaf individuals, spoken measures of phonological awareness (PA) are not appropriate, as these deaf individuals do not use any spoken language or their oral language is rated as low on levels of aural comprehension. Given the need to have accessible measures of spoken language PA for...

BACKGROUND Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) uses the melodic elements of speech to improve language production in severe nonfluent aphasia. A crucial element of MIT is the melodically intoned auditory input: the patient listens to the therapist singing a target utterance. Such input of melodically intoned language facilitates production, whereas auditory input of spoken language does not. MET...

Bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults. In contrast, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. Here, we investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposur...

In this paper, we introduce a natural language interface for human-robot interaction (HRI) to develop building guidance robots. We have developed POSTECH Spoken Dialog System for Guidance Robots (POSSDS-GR). POSSDS-GR consists of automatic speech recognizer, spoken language understanding, dialog manager, natural language generator, and text-to-speech synthesizer. Each module is designed and imp...

This paper discusses the project “Spoken Karaim: the CD”, describing the origin and evolution of the project, and how multimedia materials can support language learning, particularly in the case of endangered languages. The Spoken Karaim CD is one component of a larger enterprise that aims to document and support the Karaim language (see Csat` , this volume). The CD itself aims to support the K...

Spoken language is one of the most natural, efficient, flexible, and economical means of communication among humans. As computers play an ever increasing role in our lives, it is important that we address the issue of providing a graceful human-machine interface through spoken language. In this paper, we will describe our recent efforts in moving beyond the scope of speech recognition into the ...

Comprehension of spoken natural language is an essential skill for robots to communicate with humans effectively. However, handling unconstrained spoken instructions is challenging due to (1) complex structures and the wide variety of expressions used in spoken language, and (2) inherent ambiguity of human instructions. In this paper, we propose the first comprehensive system for controlling ro...

The paper argues that everyday exchange of business emails produces a development in the work-group relationship, which, in turn, makes new communication styles possible and acceptable by the users' habit to computer-mediated forms, even in unbalanced professional exchanges. The focus is on the (spoken) discourse features of email messages in a self-compiled corpus of selected computer-mediated...