References to internal states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, and desires) indicate children's appreciation of people's inner worlds. Many children spend time playing video games; however, the nature of children's speech when doing so has received little attention. We investigated the use of internal state language (ISL) as 251 seven-year-olds played…

The self-administered interview (SAI©) is a booklet in which eyewitnesses write down their memories of an incident without assistance. The SAI can gather a significant amount of eyewitness information, and completing the SAI soon after witnessing an event can improve later recall. This study aimed to reveal the factor of effectiveness of the SAI…

Although second language (L2) learners often have difficulty with learning the L2 pronunciation, the literature has reported a mix of more successful and less successful learners. Many factors could contribute to individual variation in L2 speech sound learning. This dissertation examines a few factors that are hypothesized to influence L2…

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input…

Background: While automatic speech recognition (ASR) is increasingly used for commercial purposes, its influence on the learners' linguistic performance in terms of oral complexity, accuracy and fluency was under-explored. To date, few studies have been conducted to investigate how the dictation ASR technology could be incorporated into language…

In second or foreign language (SFL) education, oral corrective feedback (OCF) is widely used to individually correct students' erroneous utterances during classroom hours. However, students cannot have sufficient opportunities for oral production and personalized feedback during classroom hours if a class is large-scale with many students. This…

This paper aims to investigate to what extent preschoolers' narrative speech can be affected by the combined use of five narrative elements: narrative framing, narrative basic structure, intertextual hero, plot subversion and image-text interaction. It presents an intervention aiming to teach these elements to an experimental group of…

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from…

In current research into second language (L2) speaking, aspects of fluency are measured as static constructs. Averaged over a complete speaking performance, for instance, syllables per minute is calculated. Similarly, the number of pauses is calculated per minute, averaged over a complete speaking task. This paper argues, however, that we need to…

This study examines the effectiveness of study abroad and pragmatic instruction on L2 learners' acquisition of the speech acts of requesting, thanking, and refusing. In the study, speech acts produced by L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad for six weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina and L2 learners who received eight weeks of pragmatic…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of instruction order on the speech production response when adopting higher effort speaking styles, specifically loud and clear speech. Method: Speech intensity, lip aperture range, and speech rate data were collected from 24 talkers who repeated the utterance "Buy Bobby a…

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that affects 5-17% children, and persists into adulthood. Speech perception in noise (SPIN) ability in dyslexia has been largely examined in previous studies. However, the available literature remains controversial and it is unclear under which conditions the deficits occur. The…

Students require speaking to communicate and process information. However, their speaking skills are still low, as they are still, for example, unable to produce their arguments, ideas, or feelings communicatively. This study aims to determine the application of the film-based drama method in improving speaking skills of grade VI elementary school…

In none of the deception studies that used drawings to date, was the effect of sketching on both speech content and drawing content examined, making it unclear what the full potential is of the use of drawings as a lie detection tool. A total of 122 truth tellers and liars took part in the study who did or did not sketch while narrating their…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to explore the relationships among vocal effort, extrinsic laryngeal muscle activity, and vocal tract length (VTL) within healthy speakers. We hypothesized that increased vocal effort would result in increased suprahyoid muscle activation and decreased VTL, as previously observed in individuals with vocal…