Argues that journalism and communications instruction at the secondary level should not focus on production techniques, but rather should serve as a laboratory for citizenship training, helping to prepare young people to be more informed and effective citizens. (SR)

Examines two activities bilingual speakers accomplish while talking: medium-repair and other-language repair. Both activities are accomplished when speakers draw on their other languages to overcome difficulties in one of their languages. (Author/VWL)

Deals with the effects of aesthetic quality and argumentational integrity or fairness on the persuasiveness of contributions to argumentation. Basic argumentative dialogs were varied in aesthetic quality via the use of figurative language and in fairness via the addition of faulty, insincere, or unjust arguments.(Author/VWL)

Grade 11 students analyzed direct, indirect, and free indirect speech in texts before and after eight classroom activities based on Critical Language Awareness. The activities influenced marked improvement in their ability to critically read reported speech. (SK)

Introduces an issue of the journal containing articles that investigate candidate components of a prosodic system in sign languages, within the context of particularly relevant issues raised in spoken language research. (Author/VWL)

Suggests that understanding the impact of hate speech in cyberspace necessitates examining how virtual environments affect the conditions under which such repetitions can and do occur. Argues that it may also open up the possibility for a more immediate and radical recontextualization of hate speech. (SG)

Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit sentence comprehension difficulties. In some instances, these difficulties appear to be related to poor linguistic knowledge and, in other instances, to inferior general processing abilities. Two processing deficiencies evidenced by these children include reduced linguistic processing…

Previous authors have shown that orthographic experience modifies phonological awareness, yet whether it also impacts on automatic speech processing has not been explored. In the present study, we replicated the effect of early orthographic experience on phonological awareness, and further demonstrated that on-line speech processing varied between…

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was…

This study investigated the effects of noise and filtering on the intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four normal hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking Boothroyd's forced-choice phonetic contrast material designed for measurement of speech…

Purpose: Increased speaking rate is a commonly reported perceptual characteristic among males with fragile X syndrome (FXS). The objective of this preliminary study was to determine articulation rate--one component of perceived speaking rate--and vowel space characteristics of young males with FXS. Method: Young males with FXS (n = 38), …

We live in a climate ripe for noise: Media outlets and 24-hour news cycles mean that everyone with access to a computer has access to a megaphone to broadcast their views. Never before in human history has an opinion had the opportunity to reach so many so quickly regardless of its accuracy or appropriateness. Of course, it's difficult to hear…

EEG was recorded as adults watched short segments of spontaneous discourse in which the speaker's gestures and utterances contained complementary information. Videos were followed by one of four types of picture probes: cross-modal related probes were congruent with both speech and gestures; speech-only related probes were congruent with…

Purpose: The purposes were (a) to compare masking of consonant bursts by adjacent vowels for listeners with and without hearing loss and (b) to determine the extent to which the temporal intraspeech masking can be reduced by a simulated hearing-aid frequency-response shaping. Method: Fourteen adults with sensorineural hearing loss and 10 with…

Dismissed as a passive behavior that comes naturally, listening is, in fact, a complex and learned activity that can be perfected. Like reading, writing, and speaking, listening as a practical activity is critical for success in college life and beyond. But while rhetoric as the art of speaking has been a basic course in higher education for…