This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for…

Oral communication ability has become increasingly important to many EFL students. Several commercial software programs based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies are available but their prices are not affordable for many students. This paper will demonstrate how the Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), a…

The growing participation of nonnative English-speaking (NNES) international students in English-speaking graduate schools has prompted scholars to explore the different challenges (i.e., linguistic, social, and financial) that complicate these students' academic pursuits. The analyses offered by previous studies have often focused on students'…

Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…

The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation's focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

This paper discusses the importance of listening comprehension in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and argues that more emphasis should be given to listening comprehension. It cites significant research findings in second language acquisition and reviews the relationship between listening comprehension and language learning. Research…

Background: A subset of children with Developmental Language Delay (DLD) encountered difficulties with the regulation of spoken discourse. In the conversations of caretakers with DLD children, several studies report difficulties with turn-taking, a proneness to use the non-verbal register, child and caretaker problems with topic management.…

This perceptual study describes changes in how listeners perceive VCV elements within successive truncations taken from an iambic phrase containing l (e.g. "a leaf", or "a load") spoken by four male speakers of General American English. Evidence of the respective roles of dorsal gestural affiliation between l and the reduced…

Phonological process analysis was carried out using a 40-word imitation task with 30 11;6-14;6 year old Kannada-speaking persons with Down syndrome in comparison with 15 non-verbal mental age matched typically developing children. Percentages of occurrence were significantly higher for the Down syndrome group with certain exceptions. Some…

Three schemes for assessing stuttering were compared. They differed with respect to whether they included whole-word repetitions as characteristics more typical of stuttering. Persistent and recovered groups of children were examined to see whether: (1) one of the schemes differentiated the groups better than others; (2) more and less typical of…

This article draws together findings from expert evidence and empirical studies to identify the preconditions for developing inclusive learning environments for young children on the autism spectrum. It concludes that in order to develop "best practice", practitioners need to adapt interventions to the unique needs of the individual child, work in…

Among the responsibilities of international educators is to help students begin the process of identifying the foreign in their new environments in order to learn from it. The major obstacle for Americans studying abroad in developed economies, especially in English-speaking countries, is to become sensitive to the subtleties of foreignness. The…

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to understand the experience of speech impairment (speech sound disorders) in everyday life as described by children with speech impairment and their communication partners. Method: Interviews were undertaken with 13 preschool children with speech impairment (mild to severe) and 21 significant others…