Listener-based judgements of fluency play an important role in second language (L2) communication contexts and in L2 assessment. Accordingly, our meta-analysis examined the relationship between different aspects of utterance fluency and listener-based judgements of perceived fluency by analyzing primary studies reporting correlation coefficients…

Purpose: The study sought to determine whether the onset of canonical vocalizations in children with cochlear implants (CIs) is related to speech perception skills and spoken vocabulary size at 24 months postactivation. Method: The vocal development in 13 young CI recipients (implanted by their third birthdays; mean age at activation = 20.62…

The "bouba-kiki effect" refers to the correspondence between arbitrary visual and auditory stimuli. Previous studies have demonstrated that neurodevelopmental conditions and sensory impairment affect subjects' performance on the bouba-kiki task. This study examined the bouba-kiki effect in participants with severe-to-profound hearing…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Blind people can learn to understand speech at ultra-high syllable rates (ca. 20 syllables/s), a capability associated with hemodynamic activation of the central-visual system. To further elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying this skill, magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measurements during listening to sentence utterances were cross-correlated…

Although previous research has documented the relationship between voice-onset time (VOT) and the production of foreign accent in English and Spanish, less is known about the role of this cue in perception. VOT refers to the aspiration that occurs between the release of a stop consonant and the beginning of the following segment. In Spanish and…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Research has shown that lexical tones, a suprasegmental feature, are processed by native speakers as linguistic elements just like other segmental information. Among the four tones of Mandarin Chinese, in particular, Tone 2 and Tone 3 are very similar in their pitch contour shapes and thus can be difficult to distinguish in native and nonnative…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

While it is hypothesized that providing instruction based on individuals' preferred learning styles improves learning (i.e., reading for visual learners and listening for auditory learners, also referred to as the "meshing hypothesis"), after a critical review of the literature Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) concluded that…

Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…

Research suggests that listener perceptions of a speaker's oral language use, or a speaker's "comprehensibility," may be influenced by a variety of speaker-, listener-, and context-related factors. Primary speaker factors include aspects of the speaker's proficiency in the target language such as pronunciation and…

Previous research has suggested that training on a musical instrument is associated with improvements in working memory and musical pitch perception ability. Good working memory and musical pitch perception ability, in turn, have been linked to certain aspects of language production. The current study examines whether working memory and/or pitch…