Following the integration of an online homework tool--MyEnglishLab (MEL)--into their English courseware products, Pearson sought to explore how one of these products, Speakout, was being implemented with MyEnglishLab and perceptions about the impact it was having on learning. Speakout is a comprehensive eight-level General British English course…

This executive summary report highlights Austin Independent School District English learner students' (ELs) state-required English language proficiency test performance on the 2018 Spring administration. Student performance is summarized by domain and composite ratings, and years in U.S. schools. The changes made to the test are also discussed. A…

Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners' foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who…

This research report presents a summary of research and development efforts devoted to creating scoring models for automatically scoring spoken item responses of a pilot administration of the Test of English-for-Teaching ("TEFT"™) within the "ELTeach"™ framework.The test consists of items for all four language modalities:…

This study investigates a particular behavior in talk-in-interaction that appears to be, at least in its most explicit form, relatively unique to children, that is, the behavior whereby one participant explicitly instructs another participant to say a specific phrase, after which the first participant then supplies a prefashioned response. Rather…

We examined code-switching (CS) in the speech of twenty-four bilingual caregivers when speaking with their 18- to 24-month-old children. All parents CS at least once in a short play session, and some code-switched quite often (over 1/3 of utterances). This CS included both inter-sentential and intra-sentential switches, suggesting that at least…

Brain imaging studies suggest that children can simultaneously develop, learn, and use two languages. A visual language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), facilitates development at the earliest possible moments in a child's life. Spoken language development can be delayed due to diagnostic evaluations, device fittings, and auditory skill…

Purpose: The authors determined the accuracy of younger and older adults in identifying vocal emotions using the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS; Dupuis & Pichora-Fuller, 2010a) and investigated the possible contributions of auditory acuity and suprathreshold processing to emotion identification accuracy. Method: In 2 experiments, younger…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and characterize the training-induced changes in speech-in-noise perception in children with congenital deafness who have cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-seven children with congenital deafness who have CIs were studied. Eleven children with CIs were trained on a speech-in-noise task,…

Speakers of all ages spontaneously gesture as they talk. These gestures predict children's milestones in vocabulary and sentence structure. We ask whether gesture serves a similar role in the development of narrative skill. Children were asked to retell a story conveyed in a wordless cartoon at age five and then again at six, seven, and eight.…

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on…

Evaluative reactions to language stimuli are presumably dynamic events, constantly changing through time as the signal unfolds, yet the tools we usually use to capture these reactions provide us with only a snapshot of this process by recording reactions at a single point in time. This paper outlines and evaluates a new methodology which employs…

This dissertation investigates the effect of phonetically cued emotional information (i.e., emotional prosody) on spoken word recognition. Even words whose meanings are not emotionally laden (e.g., "pineapple") can be uttered in a way that conveys anger, happiness, or sadness through phonetic modulation, and the current work investigates…

New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) became an official language (NZSL Act 2006) when its vitality was already under pressure. Even though its institutional status has improved recently, the traditional community domains of NZSL use and transmission are apparently shrinking inasmuch as most of the deaf children who have cochlear implants are acquiring…

Intensive English Program (IEP) Instructors and content faculty both listen to international students at the university. For these two groups of instructors, this study compared perceptions of international student speech by collecting comprehensibility ratings and transcription samples for intelligibility scores. No significant differences were…