Argues that the assumption of semantic realism is necessary to any intellectual or disciplinary concept of communication. Distinguishes between meaning and significance. Outlines a coherentist epistemology for meaning by addressing issues in intelligibility, order, and verification. Explains how a theory of communication can use various…

Offers a keynote address presented to the Southern States Communication Association. Outlines why communication may be considered the central academic discipline, a site where other disciplines intersect. Issues a challenge to take stock and pride in the discipline of communication. (SR)

Characterizes political correctness as a "culture war," with culture as both the weapon and the prize. Maintains that communication scholars have important things to say in and about the debates. (SR)

Investigated whether current approaches to automatically classifying dialog acts (DAs) in natural conversation could be improved by adding prosodic information. Using conversations from the switchboard corpus, researchers annotated DAs, automatically extracting prosodic features for each DA. Results indicated that DAs are redundantly marked in…

Draws on experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to argue that recent trends in writing center theory and practice see literacy as a multimodal activity in which oral, written, and visual communication intertwine and interact. (NH)

Uses conversation analysis to investigate reported speech in talk-in-interaction. Beginning with an examination of direct and indirect reported speech, the article highlights some of the design features of the former, and the sequential environments in which it occurs. (Author/VWL)

A combination of perceptual and electropalatographic (EPG) analysis is used to investigate speech production in three adolescent speakers with a history of cleft palate. All the subjects still sound markedly atypical. Their speech output is analysed in three conditions: diadochokinetic tasks; single word production; connected speech. Comparison of…

This study examined patterns of lung volume use in speakers with Parkinson disease (PD) during an extemporaneous speaking task. The performance of a control group was also examined. Behaviors described are based on acoustic, kinematic and linguistic measures. Group differences were found in breath group duration, lung volume initiation, and lung…

This paper explores how a group of Korean born, Korean-American high school students came to understand race and racism in the US through social interactions and conversations, with particular attention paid to the locality of time, space and people engaged. Therefore, we explore not only how race and racism are socially constructed in the lives…

The exercise that this author calls "TRAFFIC" encourages student-centered classroom discussions that aid students in better understanding the reflective, affective, and effective components of oral communication practice. Entering a dialogue is akin to being in traffic, and traffic is a powerful metaphor to use when talking with students about…

Do young infants treat speech as a special signal, compared with structurally similar non-speech sounds? We presented 2- to 7-month-old infants with nonsense speech sounds and complex non-speech analogues. The non-speech analogues retain many of the spectral and temporal properties of the speech signal, including the pitch contour information…

The purpose of this brief commentary is to determine which language skill Polish higher school learners think ought to be practiced most frequently during Spanish classes. Fifteen undergraduate students who study at AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland were surveyed, and the authors found that most learners (73%) want to practice…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. The symptomotology, functional bases, and neural substrates of this disorder are still being elucidated. In this case study, acoustic analyses were performed on the speech of a 46-year old monolingual female who…

In Canada, as in other anglophone countries, classrooms are becoming more diverse as the number of English language learners (ELLs) increases. More and more teachers are faced with the task of meeting the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In this article, I share excerpts of dialogue between ELL students, native…

Purpose: A nationwide survey was conducted to determine if speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use nonspeech oral motor exercises (NSOMEs) to address children's speech sound problems. For those SLPs who used NSOMEs, the survey also identified (a) the types of NSOMEs used by the SLPs, (b) the SLPs' underlying beliefs about why they use NSOMEs, (c)…