The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of visual strategies with preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their peers during play group sessions. A changing-criterion design was implemented with three preschool-aged children with ASD while they participated in play groups with four typically-developing peers.…

Prosody or speech melody subserves linguistic (e.g., question intonation) and emotional functions in speech communication. Findings from lesion studies and imaging experiments suggest that, depending on function or acoustic stimulus structure, prosodic speech components are differentially processed in the right and left hemispheres. This direct…

This is the first of two articles which will explore how written personal stories promote creativity, competence, belonging, self-expression, and a sense of purpose among students who, for a variety of reasons, have been labeled "at risk" or "delinquent." They present scenarios of students, teachers, elders, and others working together and samples…

Background: There is a need for assessments of psychological difference and disorder in people who have more severe intellectual disability (ID). Hyperactivity and impulsivity are two behavioural domains of importance as they are correlated with self-injury and aggression and this alludes to a shared cognitive correlate of compromised behavioural…

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences in gesture frequency and the extent to which exposure to two cultures would affect the gesture frequency of bilinguals when speaking in both languages. The Chinese-speaking monolinguals from China, English-speaking monolinguals from America, and Chinese-English bilinguals from…

The constant and continuous need for the university to work towards producing graduates who meet and exceed the requirements of their chosen industry has prompted the effort to gather feedback from those industries. The effort by researchers of an engineering-based university in the East Coast Region of Malaysia to collect information on the…

This article centers the stories of two eighth grade students in the context of a social action literacy project. Their teacher designed curriculum that scaffolded opportunities for them to address English language arts standards while speaking out for social change. The students' responses to the project reveal their civic literacy practices, as…

Purpose: To explore variables associated with self-reported communicative participation in a sample (n = 498) of community-dwelling adults with multiple sclerosis (MS). Method: A battery of questionnaires was administered online or on paper per participant preference. Data were analyzed using multiple linear backward stepwise regression. The…

This study compares characteristics of fluency in student audio journals recorded in a laboratory setting with those recorded using mobile audio devices. Forty graduate students enrolled in four oral communication courses at an American university recorded weekly audio journals for a 10-week term. Students chose the environment in which they…

This paper quantifies differences in speaking rates in a first and second language, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speakers' abilities to convey information. The participants were 14 fluent (CEF B2/C1) English L2 speakers who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal…

One of the most controversial policies in minority education concerns the so-called inland ethnic minority schools or classes in Han-inhabited areas in China. From 2000 onward, the boarding Xinjiang Classes have been established in the eastern cities of China for high school students from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to educate young…

Intensification is a means of indexing the speakers' perspective. This paper attempts to show the semantic development of particular intensifiers following Langacker's framework of subjectivity. In this framework, the focus lies on the way the conceptualizer construes an event or a situation as an observer or as an experiencer with degrees of…

How to improve students' ability of speaking English? That is the key point we are concerned about. This paper discusses the possibility and necessity of improving students' ability by combining the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the time course of spoken word recognition in 2-year-old children who use cochlear implants (CIs) in quiet and in the presence of speech competitors. Method: Children who use CIs and age-matched peers with normal acoustic hearing listened to familiar auditory labels, in quiet or in the presence of…