Purpose: This study examined the effects of feedback training, familiarization training, and no training on naive listeners' word identification (WI) and magnitude estimation scaling (MES) judgments of the speech intelligibility of children with severe-to-profound hearing impairments. Method: Depending on the training group, listeners received a…

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison") are due to anticipation of structural…

The comprehensive listening curriculum occupies an important position in elementary teaching stage for English major. How could we arrange the listening class better? Considering the characteristics of comprehensive listening curriculum for English major, teachers can help students improve speaking by listening, cultivating their thinking and…

This paper is intended for early childhood caregivers--teachers in centers and those caring for children in homes. It is intended to help caregivers learn more about how children develop the ability to "use words" to communicate their thoughts and needs and ask questions, and to "understand language they hear" in conversations and in books. Why is…

In China many non-English majors, who often score high on English exams that emphasize reading comprehension and grammar, have difficulty finding the English words they need to express their ideas in speaking and writing. This problem is not unusual, and it is often difficult for students to use their receptive reading and listening vocabulary for…

The study examined whether item bias is present in the "Preschool Language Scale-4" (PLS-4). Participants were 440 children (3-5 years old; 86% English-speaking Hispanic and 14% European American) who were enrolled in Head Start programs. The PLS-4 items were analyzed for differential item functioning (DIF) using logistic regression and…

Mostly low-income African American and Hispanic teens (N = 192) were tested in (a) passage comprehension, (b) vocabulary ability, (c) cloze task performance, and (d) listening comprehension in the spring and vocabulary in the fall. Students were surveyed about reading (a) narrative, (b) expository, (c) teen culture, and (d) online texts.…

This article investigates whether authentic native speaker (NS) to NS speech can be made available to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results from various preliminary tests seem to indicate that the use of a slow-down algorithm in many cases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count,…

Evaluating the structural quality of arguments is a skill that is important to students' ability to comprehend the arguments of others and produce their own. The authors examined college and high school students' ability to evaluate the quality of 2-clause (claim-reason) arguments and tested a tutorial to improve this ability. These experiments…

Lesion studies have demonstrated impairments of specific types of phonological processes. However, results from neuropsychological studies of speech sound processing have been inconclusive as to the role of specific brain regions because of a lack of a one-to-one correspondence between behavioural patterns and lesion location. Functional…

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate the effects of textual and visual annotations on Spanish listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in the context of an online multimedia listening activity. 95 students who were enrolled in different sections of first year Spanish classes at a community college and a large…

This study was an investigation of the effect of English Learning in the Elementary School (ELES) on both English language skills and affective variables. The participants were 145 public junior high school students in Grades 7 and 8; 72 participants received English language instruction once a week in the local public elementary schools in…

The authors report an implemented environment for computer-assisted authoring of test items and provide a brief discussion about the applications of NLP techniques for computer assisted language learning. Test items can serve as a tool for language learners to examine their competence in the target language. The authors apply techniques for…

This article outlines the findings of typological differences between the Level 4 (L4) and Level 5 (L5) of the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) in the Russian passages, as explored through the comparative linguistic and content analysis of highly abstract and idiosyncratic philosophical, literary and colloquial perspectives on culture,…

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal…