In the absence of a Spanish prosody assessment procedure, an English one (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems Children: PEPS-C) has been adapted for use with Iberian Spanish speakers. The paper describes the scope, principles and methods of the test and the modifications other than lexical translation that were required to produce a Spanish procedure. Findings from the first studies of data ...

Morphological parsers are typically developed for languages without contrastive tonal systems. Ha, a typical Bantu language of Western Tanzania, proposes a challenge to these parses with both lexical and grammatical pitch-accent that would, in order to describe the tonal phenomena, seem to require an approach with a separate level for the tones. However, since the Two-Level Morphology (Koskenni...

The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which display an F0 contrast in the other dialects. The production and perception of tones in the three dialects is investigated, using recordings and perception tests. As expected...

There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabula...

This article attempts to analyze the differences and similarities in domain, collocation, semantic prosody of Chinese synonyms “jiǎn, qiē, kǎn, gē” native language corpus learner corpus, using online retrieval tool Sketch Engine. Firstly, usage domains word frequency distributions these four verbs are statistically analyzed. Secondly, common collocations retrieved sorted based on LogDice values...

Abstract Using rhetorical figures in specialized languages like the language of newspaper headlines is common. The present study attempted to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Persian sport newspaper headlines related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Toward this end, a corpus consisting of 400 English and 400 Persian headlines published during 12th of June to 13th of July, 2014 was c...

This study examines phonological and phonetic properties of contrastive referential expressions. An interactive holiday tree decoration task provided sequences of ornaments to prompt production of target noun phrases in spontaneous conversation. This paper presents an analysis of a subset of referential expressions that were uttered in contrastive discourse contexts, focusing on the production ...

We were focusing on the core test. One primary and two contrastive systems were submitted. Primary system was a fusion of all GMM-UBM, SVM-GSV and SVM-GLDS systems described in this paper. The first contrastive system was a fusion of GMM-UBM based systems described in Section 3.1, the next was a fusion of SVM based systems described in Section 3.2. All the submitted scores can be interpreted as...

In this study the local and global prosodic exponents of information structure are examined in the production of six Bulgarian question-answer elicited sentences under different focus conditions (broad focus and non-contrastive and contrastive narrow focus). Local cues are the phonetic properties of the nuclear accented syllables, while global cues reflect broader phonetic patterns in the inter...

Contrastive topic is an information structural category that is usually associated with a specific intonation, which tends to be similar across languages (a rising pitch accent). The aim of the present study is to examine whether this also true of Estonian. Three potential prosodic correlates of contrastive topics are examined: marking with a particular pitch accent type, an emphatic realizatio...