The phenomenon of intrinsic vowel F0 (IF0), in which high vowels exhibit higher F0 than low vowels, has been widely attested in languages of the world. Most often, IF0 is regarded as an automatic, physiologically determined phenomenon, whereas others claim that IF0 is a controlled feature, introduced to enhance vowel contrasts. This paper presents new evidence on this issue by means of a cross-...

These notes are meant to supplement the lectures in a one-week course introducting toric varieties at an undergraduate level. We take the general philosophy of [2], first introducing varieties embedded in affine and projective space, and arriving at the abstract definition of a toric variety associated to a fan only after exploring many concrete examples. In the first lectures we follow the not...

Although the concept of a multi-lingual text-to-speech system is a familiar one, rather li ttle attention has been given to the question of the variety of each language that is synthesized. This question can be asked not only of national or dialectal varieties but of style differences within those varieties. \Je present a demonstration and discussion of a British English text-to-speech system. ...

Until recently, most research in computational linguistics has been done on newspaper texts. Nowadays, the focus has been extended to other types of language data. This means that many linguistic descriptions and automatic tools need to be adapted or extended to non-newspaper language. The non-standard varieties corpus of German (NoSta-D) will provide a first gold standard for evaluation and tr...

In the last few years automatic processing tools and studies based on corpora have became of a great importance for the community. The possibility of evaluating and developing such tools and studies depends on the availability of language resources. For the Portuguese language in its several national varieties these resources are not enough to meet the community needs. In this paper some valuab...

This paper addresses some of the issues learned during the course of building a written language resource (called ‘Peykare’) for contemporary Persian. After defining five linguistic varieties and 24 different registers based on these linguistic varieties, we collected the texts for Peykare to do a linguistic analysis, including cross-register differences. For tokenization of Persian, we have pr...

The present study investigated the neural correlates of infant discrimination of very similar linguistic varieties (Quebecois and Parisian French) using functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy. In line with previous behavioral and electrophysiological data, there was no evidence that 3-month-olds discriminated the two regional accents, whereas 5-month-olds did, with the locus of discrimination in...

In this paper, we discuss current trends in sociolinguistic work focusing on language in metropolitan Miami, an area we contend is underrepresented in the sociolinguistics literature given the unique contact situation that has arisen there during the past half century. We focus our attention on four main areas of theoretical and empirical concern: (1) Spanish–English bilingualism, (2) issues re...

One of the important classes of varieties identified in tame congruence theory is the class of varieties which are n-permutable for some n. In this paper we prove two results: (1) For every n > 1 there is a polynomial-time algorithm which, given a finite idempotent algebra A in a finite language, determines whether the variety generated by A is n-permutable; (2) A variety is n-permutable for so...

This study investigated whether Iranian EFL learners are aware of different varieties of English spoken throughout the world and whether they have tendency towards a particular variety of English. Likewise, it explored the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards the native and non-native varieties of English. Moreover, it made an attempt to investigate whether such attitudes are gender-orient...