فهرست مطالب محمود بی جن خان

This research aims to improve speech synthesis in Persian and investigate the pitch contour fall between two H* peaks carried out in the framework of the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology. In this paper, we tested two main hypotheses. Firstly, the F0 falls through phonetic interpolation and, secondly, it involves tone spreading. The present paper argues that the first hypothesis is proven to be correct. The data for the present research includes 45 enclitic phrases that were produced using voiced consonants between the two peaks. It means that in the course of producing each phrase, it was taken into consideration that all of the consonants placed between the two peaks would be deliberately and certainly voiced. This is mainly because if the consonants were not voiced, the data analysis results would be affected in Praat. It has to be noted that the distance between the two H* was increased by adding zero to two unstressed syllables. Totally, we recorded 1350 utterances from 30 native Persian speakers. We employed Praat software so as to analyse the utterances. Besides, we utilized SPSS for further analysis. The results of acoustic and statistical analyses showed that the distance between the first peak and the following F0 valley is increased with the addition of the unstressed syllables, demonstrating the alignment of this valley with the beginning of the stressed syllable. Results of statistical analyses revealed that the distance between the H and the following L target is increased significantly with the addition of the unstressed syllables. Furthermore, the normalized pitch contour was computed for all data. This indicates that the fall of the pitch contour between the two H peaks is realized through phonetic interpolation.

This article examines the process of consonant epenthesis in Azerbaijani Turkish language (Tabrizi dialect) based on optimality theory (standard approach). To do this research 90 Turkish words and 50 borrowed words were collected from the speakers of this language. The purpose of the present study is to determine under what phonological conditions consonant, epenthesis takes place and what the active markedness constraints in explaining the mentioned process are. Data analysis shows that in this language, when adding a suffix consisting a (vowel) phoneme with [+high] vowel is inserted to stem or the preceding suffix, the consonant /n/ and when adding a (vowel) phoneme or several (a consonant + a vowel) phonemes is inserted with [-high] vowel to the stem or preceding suffix /j/ consonant. Analysis of data indicates that in the mentioned phonological conditions, when hiatus vowel occurrence, ONSET markedness dominates DEP reliability constraint, and the constraints introduced with a fixed rating can easily explain the consonant epenthesis process.

During the recent two decades, the subject of processing well-formed and ill-formed words have been exploited in the literature for different languages and different purposes. Lexical retrieval for auditory inputs has been proved to start as soon as 200 ms after the stimulus onset. However, the questions of when and how well-formed and ill-formed words change their processing paths have yet to be answered for Farsi speakers. In this study, Farsi speakers did a lexical decision task while their brain activity was being recorded by a 64 channel EEG. The stimuli included Farsi words, pseudowords and nonwords, which were very similar in structure and were consistent in terms of fundamental frequency, intensity and duration. The ERP data showed an LPC for nonwords in frontal regions, which is known to be an indicator of violating phonotactic constraints. In addition, nonwords and pseudowords showed almost equal N400 effects in parietal regions, which can reflect a more effortful semantic integration compared with words. Finally, the peak latency analysis revealed an earlier N400 peak for pseudowords as opposed to words and nonwords. The regions where N400 and LPC were identified differed from some studies in the literature.

This article aimed to investigate the Persian letter similarities based on a phonological approach and the extent to which it affects visual letter recognition while reading, and defining a confusion matrix for the letters. Presenting a new classification according to the similarities of the letters can help to control the errors which occur as a result of letter similarities. The experiment was designed using the E-prime version 2.0, and two Alternative Forced Choice method in accordance with the Persian phonology and writing system. 55 visual minimal pairs were chosen for the test. The first consonant-vowel string of the distractor was introduced as a pre-mask to participants, next the target and the post-mask were presented and at the end the target and the distractor were shown to investigate the recognition of the target by the participants. By examining the participant’s visual and morphological perceptions simultaneously, the statistical descriptive indices and Xi square analysis on effect of age, gender and morphological structure showed that similar letters were more often mistaken in visual recognition than non-similar letters.

In this paper phonological processes in pausal position of Qura’n are investigated in parallel optimality theory. Short vowels are deleted, disregarding their morphological and syntactical roles, such as indefinite morpheme /n/, nominal /u/ and genitive /i/ cases. The low vowel /a/ representing accusative case resists to deletion due to high sonority and is lengthened and extended to the emptied adjacent mora. However, accusative case vowel is deleted in feminine nominatives, which is justified by the constraint that bans every type of suffixes after feminine one and is high ranked. In addition to deletion of indefinite and case morphemes, feminine suffix /t/ is debucalized and altered to [h] in female nominatives. According to this research, ranking of constraints prevents the appearance of light syllables in pausal position and deletion and lengthening processes happen to substitute heavy or superheavy syllables for light ones. ranking of constraints prevents the appearance of light syllables in pausal position and deletion and lengthening processes happen to substitute heavy or superheavy syllables for light ones.

In recent years, the use of informal writing in Persian has grown significantly due to the increasing expansion of cyberspace and social media and platforms, and the tendency of users to bring the written language closer to colloquial speech. But on the other hand, proper tools to process this language register are not developed very much. One of the tools for low level processing of textual data is an inflectional analyzer. However, such tools are not developed for this register yet. Informal words have their own structures, stems, morphemes and clitics and they also make use of formal structures and units. Moreover, this register also consists of formal words so any analyzer for informal words should have the potential to analyze formal words, too. In this paper, it is tried to cover all inflectional structures of informal Persian language to build an inflectional analyzer. A corpus of most of its known sub-registers is constructed to extract words, morphemes and inflectional rules and morphotactics. A part of this corpus is used for testing the analyzer. After extracting 1786 unique words of the test part, inflectional analyzer f-measure is equal to 97.67%. This tool can be used in computational processing of Persian language and it can also be used in teaching Persian, specifically colloquial Persian to non-Persian learners.

This article investigates the phonetic process of consonant elision of /ʁ/ (Tabriz dialect) in different phonemic environments within optimality theory (OT). The purpose of this study is to determine the phonemic circumstances in which this consonant is deleted. Also, determining deletions governing this process by examining the interaction between global violable constraints and ranking them is another purpose of this article. The research is conducted based on descriptive-analytic and field methods. Data are collected and classified according to the position where this process has taken place. Data analyses show that consonant /ʁ/ is always deleted on the boundary between two syllables: 1. at the coda position of the first syllable. 2. at the onset position of second syllables. But it should be noted that this consonant has never had a phonetic appearance in the beginning part of the first syllable of words and also never been deleted from the coda position of words. In syllable boundary, i.e. in both positions markedness constraint MAX-ʁ≠ and *ʁ is active and located in a higher ranking position than faithfulness constraint MAX-IO (segment). The results show that both above cases happen following the deletion process of consonant /ʁ/, compensatory lengthening, deletion, and changing in syllable structure. Findings also show that constraints with fixed ranking can easily explain the deletion of this consonant in these two positions and not deleting it from the coda position of the word.

In this study, the syllable structure in Central Kurdish (Sorani) language has been phonologically investigated. In this investigation, the syllable structure has been compared with the views which are based on orthography believe in CGVCC, CCVC and CCVCCC syllable structures (based on the frequency of occurrence in previous studies). This study examines the presence of a high front lax vowel /I/ in underlying representation or its epenthesis in surface representation during derivational stages. For this purpose, both internal and external linguistic evidences are employed. An audio corpus of the speakers of Mariwan and Sulaimani, along with a questionnaire for determining the native speakers’ intuition in counting the word syllables have been employed as the research data. Evidences from vowel changes in cognate and borrowed words, diachronic data, the application of phonological rules in the syllable domain, sonority sequencing principle and selection of the most sonorous element as syllable nucleus and consonants as onset and coda, along with acoustic cues for the presence of this vowel in phonetic representation explain the phonological syllable structure in Central Kurdish. Basic tenets of generative phonology like referring to two levels of representation, and the phonotactic rules on the distribution of building blocks of syllable form the theoretical framework of this study. The results show that from two opponent hypotheses regarding vowel /I/ existence in phonetic form: 1) existence in UR and faithfulness mapping to SR; 2) lacking in UR and emergence in SR as result of vowel epenthesis rule, regarding above-mentioned phonological arguments, the former is confirmed. By accepting the presence of vowel /I/ in underlying representation and the similarities between glides and other consonants as the second member of the onset, the syllable structure in Central Kurdish, like standard Persian, is CV(C)(C). In phonetic representation onset clusters of consonant-glide is the result of vowel deletion due to the shared place of articulation with the following glide.

Tabibzadeh and Baradaran Hemmati (2015) argue that the Persian Genitive constructions can be divided into attributive genitives and nominal genitives based on six criteria including the possibility of displacing the nominal and attributive dependents, adding the plural suffix, and the possibility of scrambling or topicalization. Attributive genitives can both precede and follow adjectives. Nominal genitives, on the other hand, do not precede adjectives except for the cases that result in a meaning shift or ungrammaticality of noun phrases. They emphasize a peculiar characteristic of Persian Ezafe constructions, but they are not successful in providing a proper explanation of it. In this article, we attempt to provide a brief account of their position, show some mistakes in their syntactic arguments, and criticize the difference between attributive genitives and compound nouns.

This paper addresses the pronunciation of the Quranic words in the location of pause, or vaqf. Data descriptive generalization shows that the indefinite morpheme and short high vowels /u/ and /i/, respectively for nominative and genitive cases, delete in the pause location. This results in forming a heavy or ultra-heavy syllable in the pause location via adhesion of mora of omitted syllable onset to the final syllable. For pronunciation of the indefinite masculine words in accusative case, deletion of the indefinite morpheme is compensated by lengthening the low vowel /a/ through spreading the floating mora to the low vowel slot. The reason behind resistance of the low vowel to delete could be its high degree of sonority. For pronunciation of the feminine words, indefinite and case morphemes delete, and then /t/ converts into [h] through omission of the supra-laryngeal features and staying laryngeal node. The main aim of this paper is to formalize the phonological pattern of the Quranic words in the location of Vaqf. Research methodology is of descriptive and explanatory type. Accordingly the Quranic phonological rules prohibits to license presence of the light syllable in the pause location, while to license heavy and ultra-heavy syllables via deletion and compensatory lengthening processes in the pause location.

 

The main question in this article concerns the extent to which Persian phonology employs the contrast of a pair of phonemes in the word formation. This question is already reported for consonants and vowels. The hypothesis of the research implies that decreasing the similarity of the opposition members in phonological features increases the prevalence of minimal pairs and vice versa. For this purpose, the phonological contrast and functional load of the functionalism are quantified according to the formula of the DC. Then, the DC mean is determined for consonants in terms of initial, middle, and final positions within words, and the number of syllables for vowels using non-linear mathematical functions. Findings confirmed that the dissimilarity of vowels in length, along with the similarity of consonants in non-sonority and coronality, are among the pervasive factors in Persian word formation.

Research data include 41718 minimal pairs extracted from the generative lexicon(Eslami et al., 1383) with a volume of 52858 entries using a computer program. In this program, each entry’s phonological form is compared with phonological forms of approximately the same length (with one unit of length error). If the difference is one, the two words are considered a minimal pair. Minimal pairs that differed in consonants were classified according to their beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, those that differed in vowels were classified according to the number of syllables. Diagrams of exponential and logistic functions were employed to study the relationship between the DC in consonants and the position of consonants at the beginning, middle, and end of words on the one hand, along with the relationship between the DC of vowels and the number of syllables on the other. To evaluate the research hypothesis, a comparison between the values ​​of DCs, as well as their descending order, was performed.

Examining the minimal pairs in the Persian lexicon shows that the DC of Persian consonants increases as we move from the beginning to the end of the word. Moreover, as the number of syllables increases, the DC of vowels decreases, and the inflection point of DC mean variations rest on three-syllable words. Conversely, as the number of syllables increases, the DC of consonants decreases, while there is no inflection point of DC mean variations on three-syllable words. Overall, DC for dissimilar classes is greater than that of similar classes. Specifically, the DC of vowels (in terms of tongue height and length) for dissimilar classes is more than that of similar classes, while it is the opposite for the place of articulation. However, the DC of consonants varies according to sonority, manner, and place of articulation for both similar and dissimilar classes. Therefore, the members of minimal pairs tend to be non-sonorant and coronal.

This article is an EEG/ERP study based on psycholinguistic models of reference resolution to study the discourse comprehension and coherent contexts through co-referencing between an anaphor and its antecedent in the same spoken context. How brain is able to establish reference between an anaphor and potential antecedents in discourse has become of great interest. Based on Informational Load Hypothesis by Almor (1999), an auditory task using participants with no neurological or medical disorder was designed to compare coreference resolution of a referential pronoun and its acceptable antecedent in two-sentence discourse context. Based on this theory, and considering the morpho-syntactic limitations of Persian language for processing the information comes from the pronominal anaphor, discourse function and processing cost of reference resolution analysis was examined by situations such as ambiguity in referring expressions. Research method in this study is based on psycholinguistic experimental model which indicates the sub-processes of brain functions responding to co-reference resolution. The model used in this research represents the balance between discourse function and processing costs of reference resolution between referential coherence and referential ambiguity conditions. The ERP components shown in this project indicate that the processing of anaphor resolution in different situations imposes different processing cost on working memory. The two components Nref and Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) in frontal lobe were elicited during referential ambiguity of the pronominal anaphor (third person) which has no gender feature. Nref is a sustained referential negativity which indicates the ambiguity of the referring anaphor. (LAN) in previous researches has shown the increasing activity of working memory. This result which is incompatible with previous studies, has indicated that lower salience of the antecedent can cause higher processing cost for the working memory in order to establish a cross-reference bridge between the new information and the already existing representations of antecedent.

Abstract In this study, the prosodic pattern of Ezafe construction has been investigated under the framework of prosodic phonology. Prosodic phonology is a framework which evinces that a purely phonological constituent structure lies between syntax and phrasal phonetics (Pierrehumbert and Beckman, 1988). While this phonological constituent structure is independent of the syntactic constituency it is related to it by a module of the syntactic-prosodic constituency. Syntactic-prosodic constituency requires that the morpho-syntactic categories ought to be matched to phonological categories, regarding ALIGNMENT constraint which requires syntactic categories to be edge-aligned (right or left) with the head of phonological constituents (Selkirk, 2011). In this framework, heads are marked by their prominence by which it means that the most prominent element in a prosodic constituent is the phonological head of that constituent (Truckenbrodt, 1995). Those edge-aligned constituents make a hierarchical order in a strict manner with respect to each other, the strict layer hypothesis, in which a purely formal phonological mechanism specifies how constituents of the different prosodic levels form a prosodic hierarchy. In Persian Kahnemuyipour (2003) investigated the prosodic structure of phonological constituents within the prosodic phonology framework. He proposed that within the phonological words the right-most syllable, and within the phonological phrases the left-most phonological word, and within the intonational phrases the right-most phonological phrase, and within the utterances, the left-most intonational phrase is merit of receiving the prominence and therefore should be regarded as the head of their phonological constituents. Since the Ezafe construction is a unique linguistic phenomenon which can only be found in Persian, a great deal of dispute in previous studies can be found about the prosodic structure of this construction. While a number of researchers like Eslami (2005), Bijankhan and Abolhasanizadeh (2011) and Mahjani (2003) only investigated the phonetic realization of Ezafe construction within the autosegmental-metrical phonology framework, within the prosodic phonology framework Kahnemuyipour (2003) based on Ghomeshi (1996) takes the nouns and adjectives in an Ezafe construction, to be non-projecting base-generated X0 elements, and therefore proposed that the entire Ezafe construction is mapped into a single phonological word. Although Kahnemuyipour’s proposal was remarkably novel; he did not implement any laboratorial experiment to supporting his claim but his own intuition furthermore, considering the whole Ezafe construction as a single complex word is not intertwine with Persian speaker’s intuition. With this regard in this research, a laboratorial experiment is manipulated in order to figure out the prosodic level of the entire Ezafe construction within the prosodic phonology framework. In so doing we arranged an articulatory experiment included three sentences which differed due to their Ezafe construction’s length (from two to four words per each Ezafe construction) and we asked six men and six women of native Persian speaker to read aloud those sentences twice. 1)/ nazar-e dɑvar hame ra ʃeɡeftzade kard / 2) / bɑvar-e barɑdar-e ʔɑzar besijar aʤib-o ɢarib bud / 3) / xabar-e xɑb-e bad-e bahɑr dar hameje ʃahr piʧid / We recorded their voices in a soundproof booth in the University of Tehran within the PRAAT environment and then after we extract the fundamental frequency of each stress bearing syllable within Ezafe construction. Since we assume that each [+N] element in Ezafe construction with its adjoined Ezafe vowel construct a clitic group which is itself an allatone of phonological phrase (Hekmati, 2016); now we want to find the place of Ezafe construction in the hierarchy of prosodic structure as a whole. The most probable option for the whole Ezafe construction would be an intonational phrase, because theoretically when we combine a number of phonological phrases we would expect to generate the next upper level of the prosodic hierarchy, intonational phrase. The phonetic counterpart of the intonational phrase is final lowering in which the fundamental frequency of the final stress bearing syllable is significantly lower than its previous counterparts (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988). Comparing the fundamental frequency amount of the final stress bearing syllable of Ezafe construction with its non-final counterparts reveals that the fundamental frequency of the final stress bearing syllable of Ezafe construction is significantly lower than its counterparts (p<0.001). Having a lower rate of F0 in the final stressed vowel of the last phonological phrase compare to F0s of the stressed syllables of all the phonological phrases of Ezafe construction in which peak delay causes the movement of F0 peak of stressed syllable to the following syllable led us to map the Ezafe construction as a whole to an intonational phrase. This analysis can explain the cause of auditory prominence of each element in the Ezafe domain. Each phonological phrase in Ezafe domain absorb the secondary stress and the final word in Ezafe domain absorb the primary stress as the intonational phrase.

Since there is not total one-to-one correspondence between Persian graphemes and phonemes, Persian writing system deviates from the ideal one; though literate native speakers of Persian can pronounce out of vocabulary words (OOV words). Knowing Persian morphology (how to break a word into its morphemes) as well as Persian morphophonemic rules and related transliteration rules enables them to pronounce some of out of vocabulary words whose morphemes exist in Persian. The present study focuses on Persian morphophonemic rules and related transliteration rules.

Vowels of a language can be characterized within an acoustically defined space according to native listeners’ perceptual intuition. This study investigated Persian listeners’ perception of a synthetic vowel space in which F1, F2, and F3 varied in a systematic manner. Our experimental design was based on the “Simple Target Model”. In an identification task thirty subjects heard each stimulus once in random order, and responded by choosing orthographic signs of Persian vowels. The identification of vowels depends on F1 and F2 (p

The purpose of this paper is to prove that vowel /ɔ/ is phonetically contrastive in Katuli dialect, spoken in MohammadAbad of Ali Abad-Katul in Golestan province. The research hypothesis concentrates on existence of a back round low-mid vowel in the Katuli dialect. Five old women were interviewed each separately for one hour. They were encouraged to talk about target words so that their natural pronunciations can be recorded. At last, 100 target words containing /o/, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ vowels were gathered. The words were segmented in Praat. The steady states of vowels were demarcated by a visual examination and minimum change of the second formant. Fundamental frequency, first and second formants were measured for steady states of vowels. Formant vowel space showed that the research hypothesis worthy to investigate. F1 variable was selected as an acoustic cue for tongue height and f2 for place of articulation and lip shape. According to normality of f1 and f2 distributions for three vowels and independence of tongue height from place of articulation and lip shape, two one-way ANOVA tests for f1 and f2 of the vowels were conducted. The tests hypothesized equality of f1 and f2 means each separately in three vowels. Statistical results showed significant differences for f1 and f2 means in three vowels at ɑ = 0.05. We concluded that a phonetic distinction among /o/, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ can be accepted in Katuli dialect. Vowel /ɔ/ Phonemic distinction was proven too, investigating its minimal pairs and phonemic distribution.

This paper presents a method for designing and building a speech database for Persian TTS systems taking account of Persian prosodic structure. This collection¡ containing 2826 phonetically and prosodically rich utterances¡ was recorded under studio conditions with a female voice talent speaker. In addition to common practice of covering phonetic units¡ the coverage of prosodic units has been considered in preparation of this collection as a novel procedure in building Persian databases. The current database consists of sound files and their corresponding manually-corrected orthographic and phonetic transcriptions. Finally¡ we used the prepared database to do speech synthesis using a statistical-parametric method. The subjects evaluated the generated voices 4.3 in terms of MOS criterion.

The present paper studies the stress pattern of Persian language at the word and syntactic phrase level and shows that in the framework of prosodic phonology lexical stress in Persian follows a consistent pattern. The lexical stress in Persian follows the phonological word stress rule (that is right-most), but in accounting for phrasal stress, reference to syntactic information and internal constituent structure of the syntactic constituent is inevitable. Head avoidance principle (Eslami 1379, 1384) clearly explains this issue. The present research therefore uses this principle for analyzing the data. This paper also examines the Optimality Theoretic (OT) grammar of phonological word, clitic group and phonological group’s prosodic pattern. In this regard, the research data are analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory, and a grammar is presented benefitting from Optimality violable constraints.

Persian writing system deviates from the ideal one due to the lack of one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. The present study deals with this question that in spite of the absence of short vowels in Persian writing system and one-to-many and many-to-one relationships between the graphemes and phonemes, how can Persian speakers read out of vocabulary words? This study introduces a probabilistic- structural method that Persian speakers use to read out of vocabulary words in which structural information (including Persian morphology and morphophonemic rules) as well as Arabic morphological templates are considered. In order to test how the introduced method works, Persian speakers were asked to read a list of out of vocabulary words. The mentioned list was used by ID3 and MLP (two methods which are used in machine learning) as input, then the outputs of the method and those of ID3 and MLP were compared with Persian speakers` pronunciations the results proved that the introduced method functions similar to Persian speakers in reading out of vocabulary words.

This paper is an attempt to model Persian prosodic focus using an articulatory-functional approach, i.e., parallel encoding and target approximation (PENTA). The modeling was done on 150 utterances produced in different focus conditions using PENTAtrainer2 in Praat software. PENTAtrainer2 is a trainable prosody synthesizer that optimizes categorical pitch targets each corresponding to multiple communicative functions. The appraisal was carried out through numerical and subjective evaluations by comparing the F0 trajectories generated by the extracted pitch targets to those of natural utterances. The numerical results showed that the synthesized F0 contours were close to the natural ones in terms of RMSE (= 1.94) and correlation coefficient (= 0.84). Subjective evaluation also showed that the rate of focus identification and naturalness judgment were highly similar between synthetic and natural F0 trajectories.

According to The Richness of the Base (ROTB) in Optimality Theory, there is no limitation on the input and linguistic variation in this theory which is defined as permutation of constraints. Assuming Sorani Kurdish verbal form to be more intact than those of Ardalani and Kalhori dialects, it is treated as the proto-form and, following OT principles, and by showing different constraint permutaions, an instance of variation among these three dialects is put forth. To do so, having interviewed 10 native speakers of Sorani, Ardalani and Kalhori each, and having obtained an audio corpus, the authors consider the Sorani form as an input, putting it into different constraint tableaux, and different constrains permutation resulted which is thought to be the reason of variation. In Kalhori and then in Ardalani more markedness constrainsts are active than in Sorani. OT can deal with the variation perceived in verb forms in Kurdish dialects well.

The purpose of the present research was the study of metaphorical conceptualization of the "anger" target domain in Persian, based on conceptual theory of metaphor. For the first time in Persian, the corpus-based method of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) was applied on Hamshahri 2 corpus to collect and analyze the research data and finally for the "anger" target domain, 42 source domains were obtained. Also, the productivity of all the source domains was determined based on their frequency of occurrences in the corpus. After comparing the results of the present research with the ones done with traditional methods to collect the data of fear domain, the superiority of the corpus-based method of the present research was approved. Besides, after doing a comparative analysis of metaphorical conceptualization of fear between Persian and English, it was revealed that most frequent source domains are common in both languages and some of the sources only appear in Persian. The reason for some of these differences is cultural characteristics of the languages.

The present paper aims to examine the role of frequency lexicon in assessing lexical proficiency of Persian learners. Addressing the frequency distribution pattern of Persian words، the research in corpus-based method studies the relationship between words and lexical proficiency as well as derives the frequency lexicon from Persian corpus. To do so، formal and colloquial Persian sub-corpora were selected. To assess lexical proficiency، statistical distribution of the words was computed according to the three-level law of Zipf-Mandelbrodt as a reliable criterion. To measure lexical richness، the lexical frequency profile (Laufer and Nation، 1995) was employed as it pays special attention to frequency lexicon. It is to be noted that most frequent lexemes of both corpora were extracted after doing lemmatization. Four Chi-square tests on 861 common words in four parts of speech showed that formal and colloquial corpora belonged to two different statistical populations in terms of lexical diversity. Findings، in addition، revealed that formal and colloquial lexical frequency levels of Persian learners could be effectively used as a tool to assess lexical proficiency of Persian learners.

Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis (UVFP) and vocal fold Polyps lead to some vocal fold asymmetry and consequently, changing the acoustic characteristics. In this study, we aimed reporting these acoustic changes due to the mentioned disorders. Method & Materials: This study was a cross sectional, descriptive and analytical. Subjects were 5 patients with UVFP, 5 with polyps and 5 normal persons who were selected in an easy access mode. Normal subjects in the control group were selected among available people with considerations of their gender and age. For each subject, samples of sustaining vowel of /a/ and /i/ were obtained and then analyzed by the Praat software. The results were analysed statistically by SPSS version 17 via using Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests. In vowel /a/: Harmony to Noise Ratio (HNR) in UVFP (p=0.006) and in polyp subjects (p=0.047) was significantly different with normal group. Noise to Harmony Ratio (NHR) and jitter in UVFP had significant differences (p = 0.006) with normal group. In vowel /i/: Jitter in UVFP (P= 0.006) and in Polyp (P= 0.047) was significantly different with normal data. Also, the jitter was the only variable which had significant differences between two groups of patients (p=0.04). HNR, NHR, Jitter in vowel /a/ and jitter in vowel /i/ seem possibly more reliable for initial assessment and improvement monitoring of the patients.

Vowel reduction occurs in a rapid speech in unstressed syllables or it happens when an affix is added to a stressed syllable and it attracts the stress. Vowel reduction was described through different approaches like; Sonority-Based Reduction، Contrast Enhancement Reduction، Centripetal، Centrifugal and [AIU] model. In this article، we describe Persian’s vowel reduction by Anderson’s [AIU] model in which vowel phonetic information is encoded by phonemic categories and there is a direct relationship between vowels spectral profiles and phonemic categories [A،I،U]. Therefore، vowel reduction occurs when one of these categories delete (Deletion)، the categories are reversed (Reversion) or even one category is replaced by another (Augmentation). All of these processes are applicable in Persian.