Purposes: Investigating the contribution of each component of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) to the aphasia quotient (AQ) helps better understand the mechanisms of change in the AQ. Previous studies on patients with English-speaking aphasia have shown that spontaneous speech contributes the most to the AQ. However, the same conclusion may not…

Purpose: The objective of the present study is to investigate nasal and oral vowel production in French-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with typical hearing (TH). Vowel nasality relies primarily on acoustic cues that may be less effectively transmitted by the implant. The study investigates how children with CIs manage…

An important aspect of a constructed language (conlang) is how it sounds when spoken. This dissertation designs and implements a tool to allow the user to hear how their conlang sounds when spoken. This tool will generate spoken language based on sample text in the constructed language. Further, it will enable the user to manipulate the phonetics…

This study investigated phonological whole-word measures in bilingual Arabic-English speakers to explore how the target approximations influence children's phonological development. To this end, fifteen bilingual Arabic-English speakers and nine monolingual Arabic-speaking children aged 36-48 months (mean = 42) participated in a parent-child…

Language is a unique skill used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. For most individuals, language is understood through different sensory modalities--for instance, hearing auditory words relies on audition, while perceiving visual speech via lipreading and reading written text both utilize the visual system. Although these different…

Children's language development can reflect the developmental process of children's cognition and social emotions. The present study focuses on preschool children's conversational competence and narrative competence, aiming at exploring developmental features of preschool children's pragmatic competence through analyzing data from self-built oral…

Games are used as effective pedagogical tools in language classrooms. Gamifying language tasks can motivate learners to actively participate in the learning process. Probing how games in English language classrooms enable rhizomatic learning, this research study explores how the use of collaborative drawing, elements of gamification, and…

This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias -- an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children's early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which…

This article offers a descriptive account of seven interjections, "eish", "yho", "tjo", "sho", "hayi", "hau", and "mxm", which are adopted from different local South African languages into South African English. It investigates the frequencies, orthography, syntactic position,…

This book introduces the main concepts of pragmatics as they relate to the young English language learner classroom and research with young second language learners (YLLs). It considers the speech acts which are particularly relevant to YLLs and presents research findings on learners' development of speech act perception and production. It…

This study aims to investigate the use of criticism strategies by Thai politicians, the Move Forward Party (MFP) and the Phalang Pracharat Party (PPRP), in their campaign speeches. It also aims to find out whether these strategies are used differently by the two parties and how these differences reflect their political agendas. A qualitative and…

This study investigated how adults over the lifespan flexibly adapt their use of prosocial speech acts when conveying bad news to communicative partners. Experiment 1a (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 18-72 years) assessed whether participants' use of prosocial speech acts varied according to audience design considerations (i.e., whether or not the…

Background: The impact of hearing impairment is typically studied in terms of its effects on speech perception, yet this fails to account for the interactive nature of communication. Recently, there has been a move towards studying the effects of age-related hearing impairment on interaction, often using referential communication tasks; however,…

For proper assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders in Mandarin children, it is important to have measures that closely track the course of normal development. The current study uses a large collection of spontaneous conversational language samples to track the developmental course of five language measures: mean length of…

We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…