The article reports the views of 20 Chinese English as a foreign Language (EFL) students on the strengths and weaknesses of native English-speaking (NES) teachers in EFL teaching. Responding to an open-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews, EFL students named the following as NES teachers' strengths: native language authenticity, cultural…

A disproportionally high number of children with specific language impairment (SLI) develop dyslexia. Yet it is hard to predict which individual child is at risk. This article presents a longitudinal study of phonological and early literacy development of 18 Dutch-speaking children with SLI, compared to 18 typically developing controls over a…

This study was an investigation of the affect a leader's oral communication skill has on follower performance. The purpose of this study was to explore what affect a leader's oral communication skill with followers has on the quality of the leader-follower relationship and the follower's achievement of the organizations external objectives. A…

This study investigates how "unknowing" story recipients (C. Goodwin, 1979) use different types of questions in order to actively participate in storytelling and collaboratively construct a story when a storyteller is relaying his or her past experience, by examining grammar, intonation, gaze, body movements, and sequence organization in Japanese…

Purpose: The study of auxiliary acquisition is central to work on language development and has attracted theoretical work from both nativist and constructivist approaches. This study is part of a 2-part companion set that represents a unique attempt to trace the development of auxiliary syntax by using a longitudinal elicitation methodology. The…

This paper reconsiders the theoretical concept of "identity slippage" by considering a detailed exegesis of three model conversations taught to learners of Japanese as an additional language. To inform my analysis of these conversations and how they contribute to identity slippage, I have used the work of the systemic-functional linguist Jay Lemke…

Does the mirror system affect the control of speech? This issue was addressed in behavioral and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) experiments. In behavioral experiment 1, participants pronounced the syllable /da/ while observing (1) a hand grasping large and small objects with power and precision grasps, respectively, (2) a foot interacting…

The role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM), attentional resource capacity/allocation, and processing speed on children's spoken narrative comprehension was investigated. Sixty-seven children (6-11 years) completed a digit span task (PSTM), concurrent verbal processing and storage (CPS) task (resource capacity/allocation), auditory-visual…

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

Ninety-four Spanish-speaking preschoolers (M age = 54.51 months, SD = 4.72; 43 girls) were randomly assigned to receive the High/Scope Curriculum (control n = 32) or the Literacy Express Preschool Curriculum in English-only (n = 31) or initially in Spanish transitioning to English (n = 31). Children's emergent literacy skills were assessed before…

An examination of oral communication education in the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) identified four critical concerns: (1) Today's college students are not getting adequate oral communication education; (2) Oral communication education is being relegated to a "module" in another discipline-specific course; (3) When an…

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top-down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe the types and frequency of conversational repairs used by African American (AA) children in relationship to their geographic locations and levels of performance on commonly used speech-language measures. Method: The strategies used to initiate repairs and respond to repair requests were identified in…

Susan Goldin-Meadow's "Hearing Gestures: How Our Hands Help Us to Think" synthesizes findings from various domains to demonstrate that gestures convey meaning and comprise a critical and fundamental form of communication. She also argues convincingly for the cognitive utility of gesture for the gesturer. Goldin-Meadow presents an airtight case…

The present study investigated the dysfluencies in the speech of nine French speaking individuals with fragile X syndrome. Type, number, and loci of dysfluencies were analysed. The study confirms that dysfluencies are a common feature of the speech of individuals with fragile X syndrome but also indicates that the dysfluency pattern displayed is…