Purpose: According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to…

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…

Understanding and enhancing wellbeing are at the heart of positive psychology. Both ELT teachers and researchers have recently been urged to prioritize wellbeing in their teaching and research. However, far too little attention has been paid to wellbeing among ELT learners, especially from their own perspective. Accordingly, this study aimed at…

Purpose: Self-assessment is regarded as a complex metacognitive process by scholars. Nevertheless, in the context of English as a Second Language (ESL) speaking, self-assessment practices often rely on assessment criteria and teacher commentaries. However, speaking involves spontaneous expression with limited access to external standards.…

In their first three years, children begin to maintain topics and add new information in conversation. In turn, caregivers create opportunities for language learning. Compared to children with no family history of autism (typical likelihood, TL), the younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at elevated likelihood (EL)…

Background: Previous studies have explored the size and word type composition (nouns, predicates, etc.) of expressive vocabularies of preschool children with Down syndrome, both spoken and signed. Separately, overall preferences for modality of expression have also been explored. Aims: To extend previous findings by describing the relationships…

Background: The expressiveness during reading is essential for a fluent reading. Reading prosody has been scarcely studied in an experimental manner, owing to the difficulties in taking objective and direct measures of this reading skill. However, new technologies development has made it possible to analyse reading prosody in an experimental way.…

Oral communication and presentation skills are considered key competencies for many academic fields and professions, including science-related ones. Therefore, it is vital that students are given sufficient class time in the curriculum for practicing public speaking. It is well documented in the literature that video technology can be of valuable…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Method: Sixty-one Australian English--speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this…

Technological advancements and changes in online survey participation pave the way for new data collection methods. Particularly, the increasing smartphone rate in online surveys facilitates a re-consideration of prevailing communication channels to, for instance, naturalize the communication process between researchers and respondents and to…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

Purpose: Sleep-based memory consolidation has been shown to facilitate perceptual learning of atypical speech input including nonnative speech sounds, accented speech, and synthetic speech. The current research examined the role of sleep-based memory consolidation on perceptual learning for noise-vocoded speech, including maintenance of learning…

Purpose: Muscle groups within the tongue in healthy and diseased populations show different behaviors during speech. Visualizing and quantifying strain patterns of these muscle groups during tongue motion can provide insights into tongue motor control and adaptive behaviors of a patient. Method: We present a pipeline to estimate the strain along…

What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…