This paper identifies several key issues that have emerged through the debate over English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and suggests a practice-based perspective--which treats language not as a fixed system but as an emergent product of speakers' practices--as a guide for reconsidering some fundamental assumptions of the ELF research project. In…

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when…

Perception of intersensory temporal order is particularly difficult for (continuous) audiovisual speech, as perceivers may find it difficult to notice substantial timing differences between speech sounds and lip movements. Here we tested whether this occurs because audiovisual speech is strongly paired ("unity assumption"). Participants made…

Sai (2005) investigated the role of speech in newborns' recognition of their mothers' faces. Her results revealed that, when presented with both their mother's face and that of a stranger, newborns preferred looking at their mother only if she had previously talked to them. The present study attempted to extend these findings to any other faces.…

This study was designed to estimate test-retest reliability of orthographic speech intelligibility testing in speakers with aphasia and AOS and to examine its relationship to the consistency of speaker and listener responses. Monosyllabic single word speech samples were recorded from 13 speakers with coexisting aphasia and AOS. These words were…

This study examined the use of speech recognition (SR) technology to support a group of elementary school children's learning of English as a foreign language (EFL). SR technology has been used in various language learning contexts. Its application to EFL teaching and learning is still relatively recent, but a solid understanding of its…

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

The main purpose of learning a foreign language is to use it for meaningful and effective communication both inside and outside the classroom. This paper is devoted to identifying the main communication difficulties faced by EFL students at King Khalid University (KKU) and exploring the reasons that lie behind these difficulties. The paper…

Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this…

Two experiments investigated the effects of a music and movement (M&M) programme on healthy first-time mothers and their 2-6-month-old infants over a five-week period. Experiment 1 (N?=?96) examined the effects of the M&M activities and the face-to-face (F2F) social contact of a group instruction method on the perception of mothers'…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

The field of research in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has yielded overwhelming evidence that acquiring a second language later in life will result in less accurate production and perception of consonants and vowels in the second language. These effects, in part, are a result of interference from the already formed phonetic…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

This report evaluates a developmental project designed by School 21 and the University of Cambridge to improve Year 7 students' oracy skills. The project involved developing an Oracy Skills Framework, which sets out the physical, linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional oracy skills required by students for education and life. Other components…