Dialect Research Articles

Further Validation of a Self‐administered Smartphone‐based Verbal Learning and Memory Assessment

AbstractBackgroundThe International Shopping List test (ISLT) is a verbal word list learning test set within a realistic shopping list context, supporting ease of cultural adaptation, and addressing content validity and patient relevance. Improvements to and the wide adoption of natural language processing (NLP) software has enabled the possibility for self‐administered tests of verbal learning. LilaTM a self‐administered, smartphone‐application (app) was developed, using the virtual assistant and NLP. We have previously reported acceptability and usability data from qualitative analysis of concept elicitation interviews. We now seek to provide preliminary validation data around its use.MethodA convenience sample of healthy young adults (n = 40), M(SD)age = 35 (16), were invited to install and complete one assessment of the LilaTM app. A usability survey was also administered to explore participants’ experiences. The sample was predominantly female (70%) and of Asian ethnicity (62.5%). Data were collected in Australia, using an English word pool developed for the USA.ResultAcceptability was generally high with N = 38 completing immediate recall rounds and N = 32 completing the delayed recall round. Eight‐two percent found it extremely or somewhat easy to hear and understand what items were on the shopping list and 95% indicated that it was extremely or somewhat easy to understand what they had to do to complete the assessment. Scoring accuracy was 88% at the word item level, with reprocessing to address accent, context setting, and other NLP approaches to improve accuracy underway e.g., homophones biased to the grocery item.ConclusionWhilst acceptability was high, the importance of localization of test stimuli was confirmed as well as the need for additional data processing options to account for accent. Continued optimization of data processing to score participant responses and word item pools to reduce ambiguity is expected to further improve accuracy e.g., accounting for regional accents and consideration of homophones and compound words. However, specific characteristics of speech including in those for whom English may be a second/foreign language will be an area of focus for future development.

Further Validation of a Self‐administered Smartphone‐based Verbal Learning and Memory Assessment

AbstractBackgroundThe International Shopping List test (ISLT) is a verbal word list learning test set within a realistic shopping list context, supporting ease of cultural adaptation, and addressing content validity and patient relevance. Improvements to and the wide adoption of natural language processing (NLP) software has enabled the possibility for self‐administered tests of verbal learning. LilaTM a self‐administered, smartphone‐application (app) was developed, using the virtual assistant and NLP. We have previously reported acceptability and usability data from qualitative analysis of concept elicitation interviews. We now seek to provide preliminary validation data around its use.MethodA convenience sample of healthy young adults (n = 40), M(SD)age = 35 (16), were invited to install and complete one assessment of the LilaTM app. A usability survey was also administered to explore participants’ experiences. The sample was predominantly female (70%) and of Asian ethnicity (62.5%). Data were collected in Australia, using an English word pool developed for the USA.ResultAcceptability was generally high with N = 38 completing immediate recall rounds and N = 32 completing the delayed recall round. Eight‐two percent found it extremely or somewhat easy to hear and understand what items were on the shopping list and 95% indicated that it was extremely or somewhat easy to understand what they had to do to complete the assessment. Scoring accuracy was 88% at the word item level, with reprocessing to address accent, context setting, and other NLP approaches to improve accuracy underway e.g., homophones biased to the grocery item.ConclusionWhilst acceptability was high, the importance of localization of test stimuli was confirmed as well as the need for additional data processing options to account for accent. Continued optimization of data processing to score participant responses and word item pools to reduce ambiguity is expected to further improve accuracy e.g., accounting for regional accents and consideration of homophones and compound words. However, specific characteristics of speech including in those for whom English may be a second/foreign language will be an area of focus for future development.

은행권의 경쟁력 확보를 위한 ChatGPT 활용방안 연구

Recently, the banking industry has been implementing AI bankers utilizing artificial intelligence on-site. However, the application of AI bankers has revealed various technical issues, prompting efforts by banks to address and improve them. In this paper, we propose the combination of AI bankers and ChatGPT as one method of improvement. It is anticipated that this combination will alleviate some of the identified issues and bring about diverse changes in banking services. Specifically, we suggest enabling AI bankers to handle customer interactions by leveraging ChatGPT's ability to store and recall previous conversation context. Additionally, we propose expanding the scope of AI bankers by combining them with ChatGPT trained on regional dialects to recognize and incorporate regional expressions. This approach is expected to enhance productivity and efficiency by bankers focusing on other core tasks. Moreover, the introduction of ChatGPT for employees is expected to improve the quality of banking services through accurate task processing, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction.

When your friend takes a fall: Spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits on firm innovation via cross-owners

Patent infringement lawsuits profoundly affect firms' innovation decisions, but few studies explore their spillover effects. In this paper we examine whether patent infringement lawsuits affect innovation of firms not involved but sharing cross-owners with the involved. Using the PSM-DID method and Chinese A-share listed firms’ data from 2009 to 2020, we find that after sued cross-held firms encounter patent infringement lawsuits, uninvolved focal firms increase innovation investment significantly. Information transmission from cross-owners is the important mechanism. Additionally, when sued cross-held firms and uninvolved focal firms belong to the same dialect region, industry, or uninvolved focal firms are non-SOEs, the innovation spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits are more obvious. Finally, we show that after uninvolved focal firms promote innovation input, their current and future innovation output goes up as well. Our study reveals the innovation spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits and expands research on inter-firm interaction through cross-owners.

The Negative Transfer of Different Regional Dialects on English Pronunciation

In recent decades, researchers have become increasingly aware of the influence of Mandarin, especially the negative influence, on English pronunciation for Chinese learners. Nonetheless, few of them systematically search for and summarize the impact of regional dialects on it. This paper mainly introduces the impact of regional dialects on English pronunciation. According to several sound recordings from the volunteers, who come from different places in China. Through analyzing regional dialects pronunciation habits, the author explores the negative transfer of dialect to English pronunciation and the challenges to English pronunciation that people from different places have met as a result of their dialects pronunciation habits. Through analysis, it is found that due to the specific characteristics of different regional dialects, Chinese learners have difficulties with English pronunciation in terms of both vowels and consonants. Thus, relying on it, it is more straightforward for educators to take targeted measures to tackle this phenomenon. Meanwhile, it is useful for English learners to receive feedback and correct their mistakes in English pronunciation.

Adapting Technology to Meet 21st-Century Language Learning Difficulties

The use of technology tools in education is one of the modern educational methods that have proven themselves in a short period and have become an important reference for the parties to the educational process. This study aims to study the importance of adapting technology to meet 21st -century language learning difficulties. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, English has gradually replaced regional dialects in schools. The English language today occupied a prominent place among the languages of the whole world, and it has become the language of science and technology and the language most learned and used as a second or foreign language (FL). In the other hand, many previous studies showed that students face difficulties when learning the English language. Although these English learning difficulties in the classrooms, several researchers indicated that utilizing technologies in language learning processes is a useful instrument that could improve students’ performance. The results indicated that technologies are considered as a vital part in the recent learning process, and it could enhance learners motivations and develop their spelling, vocabulary and sentence structure skills. This study results also showed that the main difficulties that could face English teachers especially when adapting technologies in the teaching process are, technical difficulties, poor management abilities of teachers and Bad technological learning infrastructure. The study recommended preparing a technology assisted environment to cover 21st English learning abilities.

A cross-dialect study of vowel production in Parkinson’s disease

The impact of dysarthria on vowel formant frequencies is well established. Additionally, it is understood that speaker dialects significantly influence formant frequencies. However, the specific interaction between dysarthria and speaker dialect remains a relatively unexplored area in research. This knowledge gap may hinder the generalizability of dysarthria findings from one regional dialect to speakers of other dialects. As an initial step in this research line, the current study investigates the interaction between regional dialects and dysarthria in Parkinson’s disease (PD) on vowel production. To do this, our study analyzes acoustic and kinematic data from speakers with and without dysarthria, representing Midwestern and Southern United States dialects. We examine both single-word repetitions and passage-reading contexts, recognizing that there may be a significant task effect. The study includes 50 speakers, with 24 speakers (10 PD, 14 control) from the Southern Dialect (collected in Louisiana and Florida) and 26 speakers (13 PD, 13 control) from the Upper Midwest dialect (collected in Wisconsin). The findings will shed light on the interaction between regional dialects and dysarthria, offering valuable insights for speech rehabilitation and understanding speech variations across different populations.

The Effect of Regional Dialects on Arabic Vowels in Saudi Arabia

The Effect of Regional Dialects on Arabic Vowels in Saudi Arabia

Towards inclusive automatic speech recognition

Practice and recent evidence show that state-of-the-art (SotA) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not perform equally well for all speaker groups. Many factors can cause this bias against different speaker groups. This paper, for the first time, systematically quantifies and finds speech recognition bias against gender, age, regional accents and non-native accents, and investigates the origin of this bias by investigating bias cross-lingually (i.e., Dutch and Mandarin) and for two different SotA ASR architectures (a hybrid DNN-HMM and an attention based end-to-end (E2E) model) through a phoneme error analysis. The results show that only a fraction of the bias can be explained by pronunciation differences between speaker groups, and that in order to mitigate bias, language- and architecture specific solutions need to be found.

Vachana Sahitya: A Revisitation to the Contribution of Sivasaranes (Women Saints ) to the Literary World

It was presumed that writing was the talent of only the male bastion till the recent past. Women were not to be seen or heard in the scenario of literature. To the contrary, the pages of history give some instances of women’s writings, such as hymns from the Rig Veda by Lopmudra, Gargi, Maitreye ; the testimonials of Buddhist nuns from the sixth century BC; body of work by 12th century Vachanakartiyaru (Women Saints) and a number of works by unknown women poets, novelists and so on. When we look at the status of women during various historical ages, we realise that it is not very satisfactory except during the Rig Vedic period. It was the same during the early 12th century. The women were controlled by the old orthodox traditions and rigid practices with no freedom and no voice of their own. The multi-faceted socio-religious movement called Sarana Movement or Vachana Chaluvali brought huge changes in the society. This movement involved all spheres of life such as social, economic, religious and literary reforms. The movement aimed at establishing a casteless, classless society and sowed the seeds of Gender equality. The movement brought women an honourable existence. Women were not only given opportunities to realize their physical and spiritual potential but also enjoyed equality with men. A free atmosphere during the 12th century led more than thirty women writers to express their independent and new thoughts. The vachanas became the medium to express their every day experiences. Since the ‘Saranas’ & ‘Saranes’ used common regional dialect to compose the poems they were able to reach the people. Through this simple medium called ‘vachanas’ they were able to bring in changes in the society. Women writers like Akkamahadevi, Bonta Devi Sattyakka, Lakkamma, Nilambike, Gangambike and others wrote about various concerns, mystic experiences, vows, nature, kindness, blind beliefs & other ill practices in the society. This paper is an attempt to revisit the contribution of women saints to the literary world.

Dialect diversity and labor income share in China

Language, as a prominent cultural characteristic of a region, has a lasting and extensive impact on economic performance. In this paper, we study the impact of dialect diversity on the labor income share in China. We find that regional dialect diversity depresses the labor income share in manufacturing firms in China. This effect holds up to robustness and endogeneity checks. We explore the transmission channels underlying this negative relationship and find that dialect diversity depresses the labor income share by decreasing worker bargaining power, and this channel can be further explained by the depressing effect of dialect diversity on the participation of firms in export trade and regional human capital accumulation. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative effect of dialect diversity on the labor share is weak or insignificant in sectors with strong worker bargaining power such as state-owned enterprises, labor-intensive enterprises, and high-skill-intensive enterprises.

Regional and Sociolinguistic Variation of Personal Pronouns in Dialects of Najdi Arabic

This study examines the regional and sociolinguistic variation in the paradigms of personal pronouns, independent and dependent, in Najdi dialects. The regional dialects are Central, Qassim, and Northern. The social dialects are sub-varieties of the Central dialect: Hamadan, Hawazin, and Sedentary. The data was collected using the sociolinguistic interview of 25 speakers. It was found that there were more variations in the personal pronoun forms than what have been reported in the literature. When comparing forms with Standard Arabic, the Central dialects are more conservative in the number of changes to the forms. However, Qassim and Northern have retained gender distinction in plural forms while Central dialects did not. This study introduced forms of personal pronouns that were never mentioned in the literature.

Analisa Kesalahan Dalam Berbicara dan Berbahasa pada Diskusi Anak Sekolah Dasar Kelas III dengan Konsep Morfologis di Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Ali Imran Medan

This article aims to provide an understanding of the proper use of language in class III Madrasah Ibtidaiyah students at Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Ali Imran Medan, where the equivalent of most children uses the wrong language in morphological studies. The research method used is a qualitative descriptive research method by observing elementary school children. The result is that many grade III students of MI use standard language mixed with everyday language so that the pronunciation is not beautiful when applied, students are also used to using regional accents so that when using Indonesian it feels foreign, the purpose of this research is to help students be able to speak according to good and correct terms. 
 Keywords : childrens, Language, Indonesian

Dialek Daerah pada Percakapan Bahasa Arab Santri di Pesantren: Studi Kasus Pada Pesantren Pendidikan Islam Darul Abrar Bone

This study aims to determine the absorption process of regional dialects in the Arabic conversation of class VIII students at KMI PPI Darul Abrar Bone. This type of research is descriptive qualitative with a sociological approach. The results showed that the absorption of regional dialects in the Arabic conversations of class VIII students at KMI PPI Darul Abrar occurred due to environmental factors that still lingered and influenced them, spontaneous factors the effect of the lack of Arabic vocabulary they mastered, and the use of code mixing between Arabic and regional dialects. they. This absorption has an impact on the inability of students to understand language differences well, and their low mastery of Arabic vocabulary. The expected solution is to get used to using good and correct language, using various learning techniques, and applying the audiolingual method to the learning process. The implication of this research is the presence of awareness among teachers that the process of learning Arabic has not been maximized so far, so it is hoped that the solutions offered can be realized optimally

CRITERIA DEVELOPMENT FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF ENGLISH DIALECTS

This article evaluates the current status of criteria development used for classifying dialects in modern English in Great Britain. Traditionally, regional criteria have been utilized, but this study explores the incorporation of urban, professional, and ethnic dialects in addition to rural regional dialects. The paper examines the classification hierarchy, which starts with geographical regions of the south and north and further expands into subzones and counties. Further utilized criteria are related to the type of locality, and it entails analysing the distinctions between dialects spoken in urban and rural areas, as well as migration and ethnicity. The study emphasizes the significance of creating more precise and comprehensive criteria for dialect classification, given the expanding scope of studying dialectal features and the association between dialect and social status.

An Experimental and Statistical Analysis to Assess impact of Regional Accent on Distress Non-linguistic Scream of Young Women

An Experimental and Statistical Analysis to Assess impact of Regional Accent on Distress Non-linguistic Scream of Young Women

An Experimental Study on Societal Factors Affecting VOT of English Plosives

Plosives are integral components of English consonants. In phonetics, English plosives are classified into voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/. VOT (voice onset time) was defined as “the time interval between the burst that marks release of the stop closure and the onset of quasi-periodicity that reflects laryngeal vibration”. VOT is a significant acoustic feature and analytic parameter of plosives. Referring to Labov’s experimental model of linguistic variation analysis, this study investigates the influences of societal factors have on the VOT of English plosives.In this study, 15 English words with word-initial voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ and 15 word-initial voiced plosives /b, d, g/ were selected as reading material; meanwhile, 30 subjects were randomly recruited to read, and audio samples were collected. It is found that the two social factors (gender and regional dialect) selected in this experiment have influences in different degrees on the English plosive VOT of the subjects. The specific results are as follows.For gender, no significant difference exists between males and females, but the mean VOT of females is longer than that of males, which is basically consistent with previous research results. The underlying reasons of the gender VOT differences inferred by this paper can be physiological and sociophonetical. For regional dialects, the VOT of the subjects were primarily influenced by Southwest Mandarin and Min Dialect, in which the mean value of voiceless plosives was higher and the difference was greater for speakers of Southwest Mandarin, and the mean value of voiced plosives was higher and the difference was greater for speakers of Min Dialect. The results of this empirical study theoretically provide some reference for acoustic researches, and pedagogically, provide some implications for optimizations of English curriculums in university.

Revealing perceptual structure through input variation: cross-accent categorization of vowels in five accents of English

This paper characterizes the perceptual structure of vowel systems in five regional accents of English, from Australia (A), New Zealand (Z), London (L), Yorkshire (Y), and Newcastle upon Tyne (N), on the basis of “whole system” vowel categorization experiments. We established patterns of within-accent vowel confusions, and then explored cross-accent perception, assessing how listeners from one accent background categorize vowels from another. Our experimental task required mapping continuous phonetic dimensions to perceptual categories in the absence of phonotactic and lexical cues to vowel identity and socio-indexical information about the talker. Our results show that, without these sources of information, there is uncertainty in vowel categorization, even for native accent vowels, and that this degree of uncertainty increases for unfamiliar accents. The patterns of cross-accent perception largely reflect the accent-specific perceptual structure of the listener, as opposed to adaptations to the stimulus accents. This finding contrasts with the type of active talker adaptation found with tasks offering lexical information about vowel identity and indexical information about the talker.

From verb to epistemic marker: bini in Hamedanian Persian

Abstract This paper provides data from a regional dialect of Persian, Hamedanian Persian, where a verb is grammaticalized to be used as epistemic modality marker, frequently used in interrogatives. The verb didan, objectively means ‘to see’, but subjectivized in many instances to mean ‘understand’. However, in this dialect, bini, originally the subjunctive second person singular form of the verb didan ‘to see’, is used as epistemic marker. It is used in content and polar questions, where uncertainty is a common feature. Our fieldwork data show that the verb didan is used rarely to mean ‘to see’ and it extended to mark epistemic modality, used as probability marker. This modal marker is only used in questions, which share the stance of uncertainty with epistemic markers. The various features of this grammaticalization path are discussed and an explanation based on egophoricity is provided.

Tver’ Karelian as a new dialect

AbstractIn the article, the development of the Tver’ Karelian dialect is discussed. This new dialect has emerged from a mix of regional dialects of Karelian immigrants from the seventeenth century onwards. Characteristics of a new dialect in Tver’ Karelian are examined on the basis of demographic data and linguistic descriptions. In addition, the unity and internal variation of Tver’ Karelian as well as its relation to other Karelian dialects are taken into consideration. In regard to this kind of comparative study, the article reveals some significant regional shortcomings in the linguistic research material available. A discrepancy could also be found between the areal distribution of certain linguistic features of Tver’ Karelian and the main region of origin indicated by historical documents.