The purpose of this qualitative, multi-case study was to explore the oral language of Spanish-speaking preschool students and their responses to questions, comments and requests made by an English-speaking teacher. Research questions focused on students' responses to questions; comments and requests by the teacher; and whether the response was…

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher's social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold.…

We seek to understand how teachers that do not share a heritage language with their students can leverage these languages in literacy instruction. This study reports on 5 teachers' implementation of a literacy activity that uses strategic collaborative translation to facilitate middle school English language learners' (ELLs) understandings about…

Can young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities be known for their strengths? This mixed-method study explored the strengths of 427 youth and young adults with intellectual disability and/or autism (ages 13-21) from the vantage point of their parents. Using the Assessment Scale for Positive Character Traits-Developmental…

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

This dissertation takes up the issue of transparency and opacity in vowel harmony--that is, when a segment is unable to undergo a harmony process, will it be skipped over by harmony (transparent) or will it prevent harmony from propagating further (opaque)? I argue that the choice between transparency and opacity is best understood as a…

Intelligibility tests for dysarthria typically provide an estimate of overall severity for speech materials elicited through imitation or read from a printed script. The extent to which these types of tasks and procedures reflect intelligibility for extemporaneous speech is not well understood. The purpose of this study was to compare…

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored cross-linguistically in German--a language that exhibits a…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess potential contributors to listener variability in judgments of intelligibility. Method: A total of 228 unfamiliar everyday listeners judged speech samples from 3 individuals with dysarthria. Samples were the single-word phonetic contrast test, the Sentence Intelligibility Test, an unpredictable sentence…

The present series of experiments explores several issues related to gesture-speech integration and synchrony during sentence processing. To be able to more precisely manipulate gesture-speech synchrony, we used gesture fragments instead of complete gestures, thereby avoiding the usual long temporal overlap of gestures with their coexpressive…

Teaching about elocution in the 21st century classroom has the potential to aid students in learning about not only strategic rhetorical delivery, but also rhetorical empowerment. Normative, stereotypical gender roles still constrain women's performances in the public sphere. Thus elocution informs present day classrooms in at least a couple of…

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the…

Two experiments investigate the question of why dialogues tend to be easier for anyone to understand than monologues. One possibility is that overhearers of dialogue have access to the different perspectives provided by the interlocutors, whereas overhearers of monologue have access to the speaker's perspective alone (Fox Tree, 1999). Directors…

This work investigates how vowel duration and vowel quality affect degrees of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. The effects of these two factors on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation have previously received little study. Phonological durational differences due to vowel length distinction were examined in Thai. It was hypothesized that shorter vowel…

When imitation skills are not present in young children, speech and language skills typically fail to emerge. There is little information on practices that foster the emergence of imitation skills in general and verbal imitation skills in particular. The present study attempted to add to our limited evidence base regarding accelerating the…