This paper describes a method for finding struc-rural matching between parallel sentences of two languages, (such as Japanese and English). Parallel sentences are analyzed based on unification grammars, and structural matching is performed by making use of a similarity measure of word pairs in the two languages. Syntactic ambiguities are resolved simultaneously in the matching process. The resu...

(2) This property of discrete infinity characterizes EVERY human language; none consists of a finite set of sentences. The unchanged central goal of linguistic theory over the last fifty years has been and remains to give a precise, formal characterization of this property and then to explain how humans develop (or grow) and use discretely infinite linguistic systems. (Epstein and Hornstein 200...

Prosody fulfills a variety of functions in dialogues. Our study examines the relationship between different levels of perceived prominence of syllables and the linguistic and paralinguistic categories accent and emphasis which are conveyed prosodically. It is still unclear, how a notational system might look like that is able to capture the fine–grained differences between both. The notion of p...

The debate over language and thought has traditionally been framed by two opposing stances: „universalist‟ and „relativist‟. The universalist view holds that language is shaped by universals of human cognition; on this view, languages make semantic distinctions drawn from a limited palette of universally available options – and when languages do differ semantically, those linguistic differences...

Although it is known that words acquire their meanings partly from the contexts in which they are used, we proposed that the way in which words are processed can also influence their representation. We further propose that individual differences in the way that words are processed can consequently lead to individual differences in the way that they are represented. Specifically, we showed that ...

This paper presents the characteristic differences of acoustic and linguistic features observed in different spoken dialogue situations: human-human vs. human-machine interactions. We compare the acoustic and linguistic features of the user’s speech to a spoken dialogue system and to a human-operator in several landmark setting tasks for a car navigation system. It has been pointed out that spe...

Kuru is a prion disease which became epidemic among the Fore and surrounding linguistic groups in Papua New Guinea, peaking in the late 1950s. It was transmitted during the transumption (endocannibalism) of dead family members at mortuary feasts. In this study, we aimed to explain the historical spread and the changing epidemiological patterns of kuru by analysing factors that affected its tran...

To assess the link between accent and intelligibility, previous research has heavily relied on human responses, demonstrating that human assessment is influenced by such subjective factors as linguistic proficiency (Pihko, 1997), familiarity (Smith, 1992), age (Burda, 2000), reactions to speakers’ kinetic cues (Bara, 1992; Rubin, 1992), and dialectal differences (Smith & Bisazza, 1982). In part...

Using the already validated Coh-Metrix tool, this study examines whether there are significant linguistic and discourse differences between biomedical abstracts for American and Korean English. Also, the current study accounts for variation among journals’ countries of origin, distinguishing between biomedical journals published in the United States from biomedical journals published in South K...

Linguistic alignment has emerged as an important property of conversational language and a driver of mutual understanding in dialogue. While various computational measures of linguistic alignment in corpus and experimental data have been devised, a systematic evaluation of them is missing. In this study, we first evaluate the sensitivity and distributional properties of three measures, indiscri...