School design has become increasingly complex for the owner, educator, architect and designer. Decisions can affect a student's performance, a teacher's ability to educate, a facility's impact on the environment, a staff's ability to maintain that facility, and a community's desire to be prudent. But the first consideration should be the students.…

It has been recently argued that the particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) constitute a grammatical category that actively draws new members to it. Drawing on distributional and collocational evidence, this paper establishes that CSE has a new particle, "ya". The paper then proceeds to analyse the discourse pragmatic function…

How can a teacher simultaneously teach science concepts through inquiry while helping students learn about the nature of science? After pondering this question in their own teaching, the authors developed a 5E learning cycle lesson (Bybee et al. 2006) that concurrently embeds opportunities for fourth-grade students to (a) learn a science concept,…

The capacity to remember sequences is critical to many behaviors, such as navigation and communication. Adult humans readily recall the serial order of auditory items, and this ability is commonly understood to support, in part, the speech processing for language comprehension. Theories of short-term serial recall posit either use of absolute…

There is an increasing population at risk of hearing loss and tinnitus due to increasing high-volume music listening. To inform prevention strategies and interventions, this study aimed to identify important protection motivation theory-based constructs as well as the constructs "consideration of future consequences" and "habit…

In this paper the author is thinking with Deleuze's philosophical concept of the "image" of the speech-act in cinema and the implications for methodology and ethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with white teachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented in his two books on cinema and his…

This study investigates the temporal resolution capacities of the central-auditory system in a subject (NP) suffering from repetition conduction aphasia. More specifically, the patient was asked to detect brief gaps between two stretches of broadband noise (gap detection task) and to evaluate the duration of two biphasic (WN-3) continuous noise…

Williams syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder with a distinctive phenotype, including cognitive-linguistic features, nonsocial anxiety, and a strong attraction to music. We performed functional MRI studies examining brain responses to musical and other types of auditory stimuli in young adults with Williams syndrome and typically…

While it is well known that languages have different phonemes and phonologies, there is growing interest in the idea that languages may also differ in their "phonetic setting". The term "phonetic setting" refers to a tendency to make the vocal apparatus employ a language-specific habitual configuration. For example, languages may differ in their…

At the turn of the twentieth century, the sound of presidential address changed from an orotund style to an instructional style. The orotund style had featured the careful pronunciation of consonants, elongated vowels, trilled r's and repeated declamations. The instructional style, on the other hand, mimicked the conversational lectures of the…

With the range of conflicting ideas about issues such as climate change and global warming, it has never been more important to let our students outside--beyond the classroom door--to evaluate the validity of such claims by observing nature, collecting data, and providing evidence. The good news is that it has never been easier for students to…

In a recent article Huggins outlines a very simple method of measuring the speed of sound in metal pipes by striking one end with a hammer and recording the transit time as the resultant pulse echoes back and forth. We immediately adapted this for use in an introductory laboratory where we are familiarizing students with the measurement of…

Purpose: To consider interactions of vocal tract change with growth and perceived output patterns across development, the influence of nonuniform vocal tract growth on the ability to reach acoustic-perceptual targets for English vowels was studied. Method: Thirty-seven American English speakers participated in a perceptual categorization…

The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present…

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to assess the ability of an acoustic model composed of both time-based and spectral-based measures to track change following voice disorder treatment and to serve as a possible treatment outcomes measure. Method: A weighted, four-factor acoustic algorithm consisting of shimmer, pitch sigma, the ratio of…