Speaking with a foreign accent has often been thought to carry several disadvantages. Here, we probe a potential social "advantage" of non-native compared to native speakers using spoken utterances that either obey or violate the pragmatic principle of Informativeness. In Experiment 1, we show that listeners form different impressions of…

Although current approaches to second language (L2) pronunciation underscore that instruction should concentrate on pronunciation features that help learners be more intelligible (and not necessarily more native like), there is little empirical evidence as to what those features are, especially in languages other than English. To address this gap,…

Background: Hyperkinetic dysarthria is often present in isolated dystonia (ID) and is still understudied. Four main clusters of deviant speech dimensions in dystonia hyperkinetic dysarthria were initially provided: articulatory inaccuracy, phonatory stenosis, prosodic excess and prosodic insufficiency. Aim: The aim of our exploratory study was to…

Purpose: Amplitude modulations (AMs) are important for speech intelligibility, and deficits in speech intelligibility are a leading source of impairment in childhood listening difficulties (LiD). The present study aimed to explore the relationships between AM perception and speech-in-noise (SiN) comprehension in children and to determine whether…

This essay begins with the story of Vincent Lloyd who recounts a disturbing experience he had while teaching a course to a group of students of color. What does pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression require of educators? In the first section, I explore philosopher Nancy Potter's (Nancy Potter. "Giving Uptake".…

Background: Perceptual measures such as speech intelligibility are known to be biased, variant and subjective, to which an automatic approach has been seen as a more reliable alternative. On the other hand, automatic approaches tend to lack explainability, an aspect that can prevent the widespread usage of these technologies clinically. Aims: In…

Background: There is a global need for synthetic speech development in multiple languages and dialects, as many children who cannot communicate using their natural voice struggle to find synthetic voices on high-technology devices that match their age, social and linguistic background. Aims: To document multiple stakeholders' perspectives…

This study is part of a series on speech-based first impressions of prelingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users with differing speech intelligibility. Hiring managers with typical hearing (TH) rated CI users and TH young adults on various personality traits and suitability as job applicants after hearing recorded speech samples. Similar to prior…

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children's language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples…

There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

This study reports bilingual international students' communicative strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca (ELF) miscommunication in an English-medium virtual learning program offered by an international university in times of the global pandemic. Drawing upon 18 hours of Zoom recordings and supplementary ethnographic data,…

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) commonly results in the inability to produce natural speech, making speech-generating devices (SGDs) important. Historically, synthetic voices generated by SGDs were neither unique, nor age- or dialect-appropriate, which depersonalized SGD use. Voices generated by SGDs can now be customized via voice banking 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 purpose of the study is to investigate the impacts of a surgical mask and a transparent mask on audio-only and audiovisual speech intelligibility in noise (i.e., 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio) in individuals with mild-to-profound hearing loss. The study also examined if individuals with hearing loss can benefit from using a transparent…