Introduction: The purpose of this study was to decrease the number of talk-outs displayed with a 3rd grade student with autism. She engaged in these behaviors during work time, specialty classes such as physical education, music and library, and group work. Method: A multiple baseline probe design was used to measure the effectiveness of…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

This paper argues that, despite government support in financial and contractual matters, ongoing problems of retention of Native-speaking English Teachers (NETs) in Hong Kong stem, in part, from problems of cross-cultural adjustment. The paper reports a small-scale qualitative investigation into the experiences of NETS in Hong Kong and finds…

This cross-sectional study examined the effect of general proficiency and study-abroad experience in production of speech acts among learners of L2 English. Participants were 25 native speakers of English and 64 Japanese college students of English divided into three groups. Group 1 (n = 22) had lower proficiency and no study-abroad experience.…

This paper describes an action research project that addressed the issue of low oral performance in English among third grade learners at a public girls' school in Bogota, Colombia. The issue was identified via content analysis of ten field logs compiled over the third and fourth quarter of the second semester, 2010. To address the problem of…

This longitudinal study investigated teachers' use of the first language (L1) in two French foreign language (FL) intermediate level classes at two Australian universities. A native French-speaking teacher (NS) and a non-native French-speaking teacher (NNS) were observed and audio-recorded approximately every two weeks over a 12- week semester.…

Videoconferencing offers new opportunities for language testers to assess speaking ability in low-stakes diagnostic tests. To be considered a trusted testing tool in language testing, a test should be examined employing appropriate validation processes [Chapelle, C.A., Jamieson, J., & Hegelheimer, V. (2003). "Validation of a web-based ESL…

Language use changes over time. In Indigenous contexts, language alters to suit the shifting nature of cultural expression as this might fit with Indigenous peoples' preference or as a consequence of changes to outdated and colonial modes of expression. For students studying in the discipline of Indigenous Studies, learning to use appropriate…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

Mandarin Chinese and many other tonal languages use tones that are defined as specific pitch patterns to distinguish syllables otherwise ambiguous. It had been shown that tones carry at least as much information as vowels in Mandarin Chinese [Surendran et al., 2005]. Surprisingly, though, many speech recognition systems for Mandarin Chinese have…

Four identifiable disciplinary goals can be discerned from the development of political science as a discipline. These goals indicate that political science students will (1) attain knowledge about political systems (national and international); (2) gain an understanding of how politics works; (3) develop critical thinking skills; and, (4) learn…

Previous investigators have found significant relations between children's early spontaneous gesture and their subsequent vocabulary development: the more gesture children produce early, the larger their later vocabularies. The questions we address here are (1) whether we can increase children's gesturing through experimental manipulation and, if…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of speaking rate variation on aerodynamic and acoustic measures of velopharyngeal (VP) function. Twenty-seven healthy adult speakers (14 males, 13 females) participated in the study. The modified pressure-flow method was used to collect aerodynamic data of /m/ and /p/ segments in the word…

The focus of this paper is application of the concept of "sonority" to the study of aphasic speech. An assessment tool that is capable of examining sonority effects was developed and administered to a patient diagnosed to have progressive non-fluent aphasia. This tool successfully distinguished the performance of the patient from that of two…

Tennis scores represent a natural language domain that offers the unique opportunity to study the effects of discourse constraints on prosody with strict control over syntactic and lexical variation. This study analyzed a set of tennis scores, such as "30-15," from live recordings of several Wimbledon and Davis Cup matches. The objective was to…