This paper presents an acoustic and perceptual study of alveolar flaps in American English. In the acoustic study, vowel duration differences in disyllabic tokens replicated previous findings in that vowels preceding /d/ were significantly longer than those preceding /t/. Flap frequency was also analyzed based on a method of distinguishing flapped from unflapped stops on a speaker-by-speaker ba...

This study presents a method that assesses ESL learners’ vocabulary usage to improve an automated scoring system of spontaneous speech responses by non-native English speakers. Focusing on vocabulary sophistication, we estimate the difficulty of each word in the vocabulary based on its frequency in a reference corpus and assess the mean difficulty level of the vocabulary usage across the respon...

the writers of the present article have tried to explain the origin and the meanings of the word a’jam. to achieve this purpose, the authors have consulted different persian and arabic dictionaries as well as different works of prose and poetry. the writers also tried to prove the suggestion that says this word is originally persian and is derived from the name of jamshid (the mythical king of ...

This research studied the role of surface and cumulative word frequency in the processing and representation of morphologically complex suffixed words. Experiment 1 showed that auditory lexical decision times to suffixed words were influenced by their surface frequency. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a cumulative root frequency effect for highand low-surface-frequency suffixed words. Experiment 4 d...

On the example of the recent edition of the Frequency Dictionary of Czech we describe and explain some new general principles that should be followed for getting better results for practical uses of frequency dictionaries. It is mainly adopting average reduced frequency instead of absolute frequency for ordering items. The formula for calculation of the average reduced frequency is presented in...

Vocabulary is fundamental to reading. As elementary students cross over from learning to read into reading to learn, vocabulary knowledge becomes increasingly important. The massive amount of vocabulary a student must learn precludes large amounts of time spent on any single word (Carver 1994, Schwanenflugel et al. 1997), except perhaps for some words that the student will read and write many t...

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An eye-movement experiment was conducted wherein the ef...