Purpose: Tests measuring speech comprehension and listening effort for cochlear implant (CI) users may reflect important aspects of real-world speech communication. In this study, we describe the development of a multiple-talker, English-language sentence verification task (SVT) for use in adult CI users to measure speech comprehension and…

Purpose: The purpose of this research note was to examine the sample representation, feasibility and completion, and data quality when using an unmoderated remote study (i.e., conducted without direct contact with a researcher) for a listening comprehension task with 4- to 11-year-old children. Method: Thirty-five participants met inclusionary…

There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet)…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second-language (L2) reading has been extensively examined, with mixed results. Our meta-analysis models the potential impact of under-researched variables considered to moderate this relationship. Results from 74 studies (228 correlations) showed a significant, small relationship between WM and L2…

This study describes an in-depth investigation of students' integration or connection formation across multiple texts. Students were asked to complete two multiple text tasks, differing in the number of texts that they asked students to connect and the variety of cross-textual connections able to be formed. For each task, students were asked to…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a skill of social cognition recently of interest to literacy researchers. This article presents initial findings from a pilot study investigating the use of ToM to teach theme identification and theme statement formation to beginning readers who are less-skilled in comprehension. The authors designed a brief, 1:1 listening…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

Poor metaphor comprehension was considered a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but recent research has questioned the extent and the sources of these difficulties. In this cross-sectional study, we compared metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD (N = 29) and individuals with typical development (TD; N = 31), and investigated the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("low-medium-high"), elaboration question condition ("focused on the identification of main ideas-focused on the identification of speakers' emotions") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the…

The demands of learning in the twenty-first century require being skilled in the use and comprehension of multiple documents. Some individual factors such as the metacognitive skill of theory of mind (ToM) are related to this ability. This study investigated the relationship between university students' ability to comprehend multiple documents,…

Theories of reading comprehension have widely predicted a role for syntactic skills, or the ability to understand and manipulate the structure of a sentence. Yet, these theories are based primarily on English, leaving open the question of whether this remains true across typologically different languages such as English versus Chinese. There are…

This study investigates the effects of linguistic knowledge (vocabulary knowledge) and cognitive abilities (metacognitive knowledge and cognitive styles) on the second language (L2) listening comprehension at different proficiency levels. The study has also sought to investigate whether or not cognitive abilities and L2 linguistic knowledge are…

The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect…