Face masks affect the transmission of speech and obscure facial cues. Here, we examine how this reduction in acoustic and facial information affects a listener's understanding of speech prosody. English sentence pairs that differed in their intonational (statement/question) and emotional (happy/sad) prosody were created. These pairs were recorded…

This research investigated the use of English spoken discourse markers by Thai EFL learners in English conversation compared to native English speakers from two perspectives: frequency and pragmatic function. A total of 60 learners were involved in the research: 30 Thai B1-level learners and 30 Thai C1-level EFL learners. Spoken data was collected…

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and the probability of making an error at the utterance level. Method: The participants in this study included 830 Spanish-speaking first graders who were learning English at school. Story retells in both Spanish and English were collected from all…

In teacher-fronted kindergarten classrooms, questions are an efficient strategy to attract students' attention and guide them through a lesson. However, few studies have examined the related issues by taking co-speech hand gestures into consideration. By annotating and analyzing a videotaped lesson in a Chinese public kindergarten, the present…

The current study investigates the extent to which receptive vocabulary size test scores can predict second language (L2) speaking ability. Forty-six international students with an advanced level of L2 proficiency completed a receptive vocabulary task (Yes/No test; Meara & Miralpeix, 2017) and a spontaneous speaking task (oral picture…

The interest in achieving improved acoustical conditions in classrooms has increased in the last years. Some experiments on acoustics phenomena using smartphone applications appear in the recent bibliography. In this paper, we present a proposal for active learning about room acoustics for high school and undergraduate students. Students work on…

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as "maluma" and "takete" with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

To talk about space, spoken languages rely on arbitrary and categorical forms (e.g., left, right). In sign languages, however, the visual-spatial modality allows for iconic encodings (motivated form-meaning mappings) of space in which form and location of the hands bear resemblance to the objects and spatial relations depicted. We assessed whether…

The early use of person perception terms was examined via an analysis of the spontaneous speech of four young children in conversation with their parents at home. All four children were producing such terms early in their third year. Like their parents, children used the terms in two distinguishable ways: to attribute a trait to a person or to…

We analyzed the effect of infant-directed speech (IDS) on multimodal communicative production of children at the beginning of the second year of life in two different languages: Spanish and Basque. Twelve Spanish and twelve Basque children aged between 12 and 15 months observed two versions of an audiovisual story: one version was narrated with…

This paper reports a research project exploring children's peer interactions in group reading discussions where a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This context reflects a reality of classroom teaching where most children in the class are completing tasks independently while the teacher is working other groups. In the study, four…

This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural…

This mixed-methods study sought to determine the impact of a 4-H state-level youth leadership program on participants' leadership and life skills (LLS) development. Youth who participated in the study served as a state-level leader for one year. Two cohorts, 2017 and 2018 (N = 18), participated in the study. Twelve youth completed the survey and…

The present study primarily aims at comparing the ELT curricula of Turkey and Greece concerning primary-level education. With this aim, a large number of articles, educational websites, theses, and dissertations, along with The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports and Ministry of National Education (MoNE) reports…