While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and…

Speech priming tasks are frequently used to delineate stages in the speech process such as lexical retrieval and motor programming. These tasks, often measured in reaction time (RT), require fast and accurate responses, reflecting maximized participant performance, to result in robust priming effects. Encouraging speed and accuracy in responding…

The authors studied the acquisition of nine #sC clusters in 30 Croatian-speaking phonologically disordered children, aged between 3;8-7;0 years, by analysing their renditions of target words elicited in response to visual stimuli presented on a computer screen. Results did not support the idea that a greater jump in sonority from C1 to C2 would…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

Discusses the dominant paradigm for analyzing interactions, Conversation Analysis (CA), pointing out that the paradigm does not include participant intention in its analysis. Notes that CA practitioners focus on empirical investigations of what the participants are doing and how they are doing it and that the understanding of an utterance is…

Two experiments explored factors affecting the influence of visual (lip-read) information on auditory speech perception, the "McGurk effect," in advanced learners of English as a Second Language and native speakers of English. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on the information value of the cues and audiovisual…

As a step toward developing more controlled studies into children's language, this study attempted to develop standard stimuli to elicit eight basic sentence patterns from kindergarten children. Four stimuli were developed for each pattern. Each stimulus consisted of a stick-figure picture, a description of the picture, and a question or direction…

In this article the focus is on methodology for analysing learner-learner oral conversations mediated by computers. With the increasing availability of synchronous voice-based groupware and the additional facilities offered by audio-graphic tools, language learners have opportunities for collaborating on oral tasks, supported by visual and textual…

An analysis of French oral proficiency and guidelines for evaluating and testing the development of such proficiency in learning French as a second language are the keynotes of this dissertation. The speech patterns (structural complexity, rate of production, and hesitation) of three groups of French students with various levels of audiolingual…