Reports speech communication courses were taught in Malaysia as part of a cooperative educational program between Indiana University and the Malaysian government. Examines unique elements of the culture of the Malaysian students that affect their speech communication; suggests issues to be addressed in the "Malaysianized" program to…

States that earlier research led to the conclusion that speech communication as a major offers considerable flexibility in the job market. Surveys 969 graduates in speech from the University of Maryland as to their entry-level jobs, positions held now, and about which communication issues are most pressing. Provides continuing support for the…

Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to identify the cultural factors that influence the usage of household French by three French/English bilingual children in Louisiana. Using 24 months of weekly tape recordings of spontaneous dinnertime conversation, a ratio of French to English utterances was calculated, and correlated with…

Reports on a study that investigated the effect of different amounts of planning time on the speech performance of second-language speakers. Subjects were four groups of learners of German performing two tasks each. The study employed various general and specific constructs for measuring fluency, complexity, and accuracy of speech; the…

Presents a distributed connectionist model of the perception of spoken words, employing speech representation that combines lexical and abstract phonological information, with lexical access as a direct mapping on this distributed representation. The article examines the integration of partial cues to phonological identity, showing that the model…

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

A case study of a child who was stimulated with a cochlear implant at age 25 months is reported. Postimplantation, nasals decreased and other consonant types increased, particularly alveolars. The vowel space expanded, including increased production of diphthongs. Serial organization of speech postimplantation mirrored basic motor propensities in…

Language and reading outcomes at age 13 were examined in 22 children who were late talkers as toddlers. Compared to 14 controls, children who were late talkers had significantly poorer vocabulary, grammar, reading/spelling, and verbal memory skills, although they performed in the average range on most language and academic tasks. (Contains…

Reports on two experiments comparing the adequacy of naturalistic procedures in emotion-display research with standard procedures. The first experiment explored samples of naturally-occurring emotional speech with free-choice emotion labels, and later with labels from a standard set. The second compared valency ratings of words presented…

Contributes to a special issue on how the reconsideration of what scholarship is affects the way in which scholarship is assessed. Discusses what the scholarship of teaching is, what qualities exist in this form of scholarship, what its requirements are, how one accomplishes it, and how the scholarship of teaching can be assessed. (SR)

Twenty-four adolescents participated in conversations with a same-sex peer, an opposite-sex peer, or a speech-language pathologist. Significant differences were found in linguistic behaviors between conversations with peers and those with clinicians. Conversations with opposite-sex peers tended to have fewer direct questions, reduced listener eye…

Recounts results of project SOUL (Society of Unlimited Learning), a successful program implemented in the summer of 1968 to support black students. Provides a portrait of the unsuccessful student in the successful program. Establishes the value of speech communication education for culturally diverse students, the sustaining effect of speech…

This article provides information on elective mutism, a persistent refusal to talk despite the ability to speak and comprehend spoken language. It covers the history, characteristics, classification, differential diagnosis, and treatment of elective mutism. Treatments covered include psychodynamic, family intervention, behavior modification, drug…

The amount and intelligibility of spoken language output were evaluated in 15 deaf children (ages 4 to 9 years) during 15 minutes of free play with either their mothers or a hearing peer. Results indicated that significantly more speech was produced during the children's interactions with their mothers. (Author/DB)

Focuses on a characteristic of narrative style that is associated with gender. The article shows one of the subtle ways in which language addressed to boys and girls differ. Girls' attention is turned to speech, to what they and others have said. Girls hear more diminutives; boys hear more imperatives and are often addressed in a less gentle…