This capstone provides college students a virtual open-access library resource that focuses on effective listening practices in academic, professional, personal, and community settings. A review of related literature was conducted to identify research into various listening dimensions and to recognize listening leaders who have an exceptional way…

The focus of this study is on enhancing cultural competency and increasing an ethnorelative worldview perspective among instructional designers through an innovative approach that integrates global professionals and reciprocal learning. The study is grounded in the context of Arizona State University's mission to create inclusive learning…

Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

A descriptive case study approach was utilized in a southeastern United States Catholic Diocese to gain a better understanding of the conflict competency of eight ministry leaders to explore their competence in dealing with conflict pre and post education intervention. Participants were provided with a conflict scenario in a preliminary interview…

Across three experiments, the current study explored how accented speech and coarticulation impact how bilingual listeners comprehend code-switches in speech. Eye-tracking methodology was used to compare responses to single-language and code-switched sentences. Experiment 1 observed how accented speech influenced the costs involved in…

The current study investigated the effects of a novel, research-informed intervention on listening comprehension skills of students identified as English Language Learners and the parental self-efficacy of their parental learning partner. Twenty-six student-parent dyads were split into two groups; one that participated in sixteen listening lessons…

This study investigates the effects of individual differences in working memory and different lengths of planning time on oral responses from an integrated listen-to-speak task, both in isolation and in conjunction with one another. Previous studies on planning time in a second language assessment context have largely neglected to incorporate the…

This dissertation explores the lived experience of transformation in mentor-coaches trained and certified through the Center for Mentoring, Coaching, and Leadership Development (CMCLD). The CMCLD describes its training as a transformational process in which mentor-coaches adopt a listening mindset that becomes a lifestyle change. This dissertation…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine teacher mentor actions, specifically through the conversations between early career teachers and their mentors within a mentoring program in one Georgia metropolitan school system. The researcher sought to explore the meaning that early career teachers made of these conversations.…

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to identify and describe what exemplary female presidents in California community colleges do to stay grounded and maintain physical, emotional, intellectual, social, vocational, and spiritual health. Methodology: This mixed methods study identified and described the perceptions of…

Code-switching (switching between languages) is a common linguistic behavior in bilingual speech directed to infants and children. In adult-directed speech (ADS), acoustic-phonetic properties of one language may transfer to the other language close to a code-switch point; for example, English stop consonants may be more Spanish-like near a switch.…

This dissertation explores the relationship between quantitative phonetic measurements and listener identification of accents of English, focusing on phonetic distance and its perceptual correlates across various English accent varieties. The Levenshtein distance (LD) measure, which quantifies string similarity by calculating the minimum cost of…

The digital age has profoundly changed the film industry and how consumers are able to access media. To foster language development, this mixed methods study takes advantage of this technological progress and investigates how an audiovisual media-based curriculum can be designed for and implemented in an intermediate German language course. In…

Choral ensembles often operate as hierarchical institutions where the conductor maintains a position of control over the musical, educational, and social aspects of singing with little or no input from singers. This dissertation reconceptualizes the choral experience as a dialogical process where conventional boundaries between conductor and…