Purpose: In 1963, Charles Van Riper published "My Grandfather," a short reading passage that has evolved into a ubiquitous metric of reading ability and speech intelligibility. In this historical note, we describe several heretofore unacknowledged similarities between "The Grandfather Passage" (Darley, Aronson, & Brown, 1975) and a portion of "The…

The research presented in this paper aimed to investigate the linguistic and discourse characteristics of narratives produced by upper-intermediate foreign language learners in a bilingual secondary school. In our analyses we used a variety of linguistic and discourse variables and a recently developed computer tool (Coh-Metrix 2.0: McNamara,…

Provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the CECIL computer hardware and software package to analyze 28 right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse. It was found that, although right-dislocations appear to fulfill various functional roles in discourse, no correlation appears…

Argues that researchers in the area of discourse comprehension and mental representation of discourse will likely feel motivated to adopt highly quantitative research techniques described in the articles in this special issue. Notes that ability to do so will be enhanced by availability of well-documented, easy-to-use computer software, or…

This paper describes the development of two new corpus-based Dutch spelling guides using language data gathered by the Institute for Dutch Lexicology, a research institute subsidized by the Dutch and Belgian governments. The guides were produced in 1990 and 1995. The guides are based on two earlier ones, published in 1866 and 1954, but attempt to…

Language, once a cultural asset in Europe, has become an economic commodity. The national language institutes now have the task of providing the means for making knowledge available in the national language and distributing locally produced information worldwide. This includes not only training more translators, but also developing the necessary…

EVA, a text processing tool designed to be self-contained and useful for a variety of languages, is described briefly, and its extensive coded character set is illustrated. Features, specifications, and database functions are noted. Its application in development of a Slovenian literary dictionary is also described. (MSE)

This paper presents an introduction to language engineering software, especially for computerized language and text corpora. The focus of the paper is on small and relatively independent pieces of software designed for specific, often low-level language analysis tasks, and on tools in the public domain. Discussion begins with the application of…

Speech recognition is one of five main areas in the field of speech processing. Difficulties in speech recognition include variability in sound within and across speakers, in channel, in background noise, and of speech production. Speech recognition can be used in a variety of situations: to perform query operations and phone call transfers; for…

This paper describes a computerized system for tagging language corpora that accommodates the special conditions in Bulgarian language research (notably, lack of advanced technology and corresponding user knowledge). SUPERLINGUA has been developed in the DOS environment with consideration for these conditions. Information on product use, users,…

The background, rationale, elements, and organization of the newly-formed Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database containing child language data-transcripts are outlined in this first issue of their newsletter. The system was formed in response to a need for greater efficiency in data sharing, greater precision in data collection…

Part of a larger study on pre-school children's ability to use the computer to create art, a study examined the language children used as they were exposed to and trained to use a computer software program. Subjects were 4 preschool children (4 or 5 years of age). Audio and video recordings of the children over 8 sessions yielded a total of 1,501…

The demand for extensive reusability of large language text collections for natural languages processing research requires development of standardized encoding formats. Such formats must be capable of representing different kinds of information across the spectrum of text types and languages, capable of representing different levels of…

A computer-based artificial neural network (ANN) that learns to classify sentences in a text as important or unimportant is described. The program is designed to select the sentences that are important enough to be included in composition of an abstract of the text. The ANN is embedded in a conventional symbolic environment consisting of…

Humor, a reversible, string-based unification approach for lemmatizing and disambiguating language data, has been used for both language corpus analysis and creation of a variety of linguistic software applications such as spell-checking. The system is language-independent, allowing multilingual applications for a variety of language types. Its…