In this study, we address various measures that have been employed to distinguish between syllable and stress- timed languages. This study differs from all previous ones by (i) exploring and comparing multiple metrics within a quantitative and multifactorial perspective and by (ii) also documenting the impact of corpus-based word frequency. We begin with the basic distinctions of speech rhythms, dealing with the differences between syllable-timed languages and stress-timed languages and several methods that have been used to attempt to distinguish between the two. We then describe how these metrics were used in the current study comparing the speech rhythms of Mexican Spanish speakers and bilingual English/Spanish speakers (speakers born to Mexican parents in California). More specifically, we evaluate how well various metrics of vowel duration variability as well as the so far understudied factor of corpus-based frequency allow to classify speakers as monolingual or bilingual. A binary logistic regression identifies several main effects and interactions. Most importantly, our results call the utility of a particular rhythm metric, the PVI, into question and indicate that corpus data in the form of lemma frequencies interact with two metrics of durational variability, suggesting that durational variability metrics should ideally be studied in conjunction with corpus-based frequency data.

This article describes three studies in prosody and their potential application to the field of forensic linguistics. It begins with a brief introduction to prosody. It then proceeds to describe Miglio, Gries, & Harris (2014), a comparison of prosodic coding of new information by bilingual Spanish-English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers. A description of Harris & Gries (2011) follows. This study compares the vowel duration variability of bilingual Spanish-English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers, and touches upon corpus-based frequency effects and differences in linguistic aptitude between the two speaker groups. Finally, a portion of an ongoing study is described (Harris in preparation). This section describes the use of prosodic variables and ensemble methods (or methods that use multiple learning algorithms) to classify languages, even in the case of impoverished data. All three experiments have implications and applications to the field of forensic linguistics, which are touched upon in each respective section and discussed more extensively in the final section of this article. Furthermore, the applications of these methods to forensic linguistics are discussed in light of best practices for forensic linguistics, as outlined in Chaski (2013). OverviewRecognizing a speaker's dialect, gender, pathological conditions, native language, or socio-cultural background are skills acquired through training in different areas of linguistics, such as dialectology, acoustic/ articulatory phonetics, and sociolinguistics. They are also skills that are applicable to the field of the forensic sciences, specifically what has (2008) provides statistic models of formant features that represent the vocal tract characteristics of speakers, and are therefore capable of accounting for between-speaker and within-speaker variability. In the same vein as these studies, this article reviews the use of statistically-informed empirical methods used to analyze the features of spoken speech. We would like to go even further, however, and move beyond the acoustic phonetic analysis of speakers' voice characteristics. The novelty of this paper, in fact, lies in applying empirical methods to speakers' characteristics associated with the grammar of their dialect/language, in these cases different aspects of pronunciation that can be theoretically informed and empirically verified via scientific methodology. This is to say that the methodologies described in the current paper investigate acoustic properties beyond the phonemes, or the 'baseline acoustic system' to use Hansen, Slyh, & Anderson's (2004) term. Instead, it uses high-level phonological cues to successfully profile speakers; high-level phonological cues are those associated with the manner in which a word is pronounced, such as volume or melodic tone. Past studies have considered prosodic cues in speech recognition. Lea (1973Lea ( , 1976 advocates prosodic data for speech recognition algorithms. Lea (1973) suggests that stressed syllables contain more salie...

Sentence correction has been an important and emerging issue in computer-assisted language learning. However, existing techniques based on grammar rules or statistical machine translation are still not robust enough to tackle the common incorrect word order errors in sentences produced by second language learners of Chinese. In this paper, a novel relative position language model is proposed to address this problem, for which a corpus of erroneous English-Chinese language transfer sentences along with their corrected counterparts is created and manually judged by human annotators. Experimental results show that compared to a scoring approach based on an n-gram language model and a phrase-based machine translation system, the performance in terms of BLEU scores of the proposed approach achieved improvements of 20.3% and 26.5% for the correction of word order errors resulting from language transfer, respectively.

This paper brings contemporary debate in analytic philosophy of religion regarding the notion of worship into conversation with Jewish sources and attempts to identify the most promising philosophical grounds for a Jewish account of the putative obligatoriness of worship. Some philosophers have recently debated the notion of worship, focusing in particular on the claim that human beings have an obligation to worship God and on whether and how such an obligation might be adequately grounded. I first canvass the major bases for worshipping God that have featured in this debate. I then turn to some relevant liturgical and philosophical sources of Jewish tradition, identifying grounds for the obligatoriness of (exclusively) worshipping God that have been advanced in those sources. I next consider which grounds of the putative obligatoriness of worship are the most promising for a Jewish account in terms of both philosophical cogency and rootedness in Jewish tradition. I argue that a version of a divine command grounding of prayer in a Soloveitchikian mode is both well-rooted in Judaism and also plausibly surmounts philosophical objections to divine command accounts. In the final section, I briefly raise the issue of whether the concept of worship is truly well-suited to a Jewish context, suggesting that the rich Hebrew notions of avodah and tefillah are perhaps more appropriate in articulating a fully adequate Jewish understanding of the pertinent issues. In particular, I argue that these notions fit well with the Soloveitchikian divine command grounding of the obligation to worship God.

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