Purpose: This study examines the effectiveness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for individuals with speech disorders, addressing the gap in performance between read and conversational ASR. We analyze the factors influencing this disparity and the effect of speech mode--specific training on ASR accuracy. Method: Recordings of read and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate cortical tracking of speech (CTS) in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to typically fluent adults (TFAs) to test the involvement of the speech-motor network in tracking rhythmic speech information. Method: Participants' electroencephalogram was recorded while they simply listened to sentences…

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) has an impact on speech production, manifesting in various ways including alterations in voice quality, challenges in articulating sounds and a decrease in speech rate. Numerous investigations have been conducted to ascertain the oral-diadochokinesis (O-DDK) rate in individuals with PD. However, the existing…

Following a preliminary study that examined the potential effectiveness of a computer-assisted consecutive interpreting (CACI) mode, this paper presents a further trial of the CACI workflow. The workflow involves respeaking using speech recognition (SR) in phase I and production assisted by the SR text and its machine translation (MT) output in…

Music contributes to the expansion of the outlook, memory training, and the development of children's creative abilities. The main objective of the work is to determine the effectiveness of music education for preschool children through the use of modern technologies aimed at the development of the memory of students, taking into account the…

Research shows that oral dialogue has a positive impact on educational leadership wellness and practice. Having regular focused and informal conversations about educational issues and daily challenges is instrumental in reducing stress, anxiety, and emotional distress among educational leaders. However, diverse tensions related to personal and…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to describe changes in speech intelligibility and interrater and intrarater reliability of naive listeners' ratings of words produced by young children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) over a period of motor-based intervention (dynamic temporal and tactile cueing [DTTC]). Method: A total of 120…

Purpose: The study examined the use of percent grammatical utterances (PGUs) for assessing grammatical skills in Mandarin-speaking 3-year-old children. Method: Participants were 30 Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds with typical development. Language samples were collected in two visits for each child using a picture description task. Children were…

In early childhood centres, decontextualised talk is often associated with literacy activities. In this study, however, we investigated toddler-educator conversations across various activities with a focus on those about topics that were not related to the immediate context. We examined the communicative purposes and linguistic features of these…

Background: Humans often use co-speech gestures to promote effective communication. Attention has been paid to the cortical areas engaged in the processing of co-speech gestures. Aims: To investigate the neural network underpinned in the processing of co-speech gestures and to observe whether there is a relationship between areas involved in…

Purpose: According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to…

We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Understanding and enhancing wellbeing are at the heart of positive psychology. Both ELT teachers and researchers have recently been urged to prioritize wellbeing in their teaching and research. However, far too little attention has been paid to wellbeing among ELT learners, especially from their own perspective. Accordingly, this study aimed at…

Purpose: Self-assessment is regarded as a complex metacognitive process by scholars. Nevertheless, in the context of English as a Second Language (ESL) speaking, self-assessment practices often rely on assessment criteria and teacher commentaries. However, speaking involves spontaneous expression with limited access to external standards.…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced…