Purpose: Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only. Method: Ten adult-child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years;…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology affords language learners the ability to evaluate their pronunciation accuracy by comparing their intended spoken output with the transcribed text produced by ASR-based dictation applications. However, earlier dictation tools were criticized for producing low level recognition rates for non-native…

The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

This study compared Spanish-English bilinguals' and English monolinguals' VOT values for /b, d, g/ in cognates and non-cognates. Twenty-six young adult participants (fourteen bilinguals and twelve monolinguals, mean age 24 years) were administered a picture-naming task, balanced for cognate and non-cognate forms. VOT values of 30 target words per…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

The growing number of elderly multilingual speakers suffering from strokes and aphasia requires a change in the services of speech and language pathologists (SLPs), who will be serving culturally and linguistically diverse individuals to an increasing extent. Two American studies have shown that a majority of SLPs who work with multilingual adults…

The present study investigates whether training second language pronunciation with tactile cues facilitates the production of non-native sounds involving accessible articulatory features. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest-training-posttest design, 50 Turkish learners of English received audiovisual training on a set of target words…

Purpose: Multilingual children are disproportionately represented on speech pathology caseloads, in part due to the limited ability of traditional language assessments to accurately capture multilingual children's language abilities. This systematic review evaluates the evidence for identification of language disorder in multilingual children…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

The improvement of the quality of foreign language education is necessary to achieve subject-learning outcomes for the development of graduates' pertinent communication strategies in foreign language communication in various social situations. The research purpose is to develop the communicative strategies (CS) in foreign language (FL)…

In this study, I compare the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcription against two measures of intelligibility provided by human listeners. The data came from readings of five texts recorded by 15 language learners of French. Human understanding was gauged by (i) asking a group of 36 naïve first language (L1) speakers of French…

Instruction in second language (L2) English phoneme pronunciation almost invariably includes a focus on improving the learners' use of their articulatory organs to pronounce the relevant sounds. However, the pronunciation of many English sounds also relies on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region can often…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

This study examined the semantic features of the simulated mini-lectures in the listening sections of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) based on automatized semantic analysis to explore the content validity of the two tests. Two study corpora were utilized, the IELTS…