The purpose of the present study is to assess second language (L2) spoken English using automated scoring techniques. Automated scoring aims to classify a large set of learners' oral performance data into a small number of discrete oral proficiency levels. In automated scoring, objectively measurable features such as the frequencies of lexical and…

A computer program for classifying elements of a language corpus for large-scale analysis is discussed. The approach is based on the assumption that there is a natural unit in speech processing and production, called a tone unit. The program "tags" the five grammatical phrase types (verb, adverb, adjective, noun, and prepositional) to…

The project Talsyntax (Syntax of Spoken Swedish), part of a large-scale study of modern Swedish language usage, examined the general characteristics and peculiarities of spoken Swedish. Three important aspects of the study are data collection, methodological results, and empirical results. The data collection effort has produced an archive of…

Sociolinguistic Studies in a Data Base of Spoken Swedish (Sprakdata) is a project to describe the language from a semantic-communicative point of view. The purposes are to (1) investigate the possibility of grouping informants based on results of a semantic-communicative analysis of recorded spoken language and (2) examine possible…

This publication of proceedings, most in English and some in Chinese, of a conference on Chinese languages and linguistics include the following papers: "On Rule Effect and Dialect Classification" (Chin-Chuan Cheng); "Cross-Linguistic Typological Variation, Grammatical Relations, and the Chinese Language" (Bernard Comrie);…