Phonology represents an important part of the English language; however, in the course of English language acquisition, it is rarely treated with proper attention. Connected speech is one of the aspects essential for successful communication, which comprises effective auditory perception and speech production. In this paper I explored phonemic…

Due to ever-increasing demands to acquire effective communicative abilities in the English language, increasing numbers of international students choose to study in Western tertiary institutions; however, they frequently encounter difficulties in performing satisfactorily in English. This study aims to identify specific challenges that Japanese…

This study explored the students' and instructors' perception of effective teaching characteristics as well as investigating the distinction between them as perceived by 137 students and six instructors in a Community College in Southeastern United States. Convenience sampling method was used to select the population and sample of the study. Using…

Objectives: It has long been speculated that effortful listening places children with hearing loss at risk for fatigue. School-age children with hearing loss experiencing cumulative stress and listening fatigue on a daily basis might undergo dysregulation of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity resulting in elevated or flattened…

This dissertation explores the processes that drive perceptual adaptation to variation in speech by examining how sources of prediction and uncertainty modulate perceptual learning processes. In particular, we examined how the perceptual system leverages different types of information during adaptation, varying in the degree to which they predict…

This study examined the impact of servant leadership practices as perceived by faculty and staff in an urban Focus elementary school. A mixed-methods design was used to explore the impact of the school leader's servant leadership practices on the behavior and perceptions of the faculty and staff, and the challenges a school leader faces as a…

Children entering kindergarten and grade 1 vary greatly in their emergent literacy skills. Because preschool teachers can help set the foundation of literacy skills related to school readiness, one way to address those gaps is to build teachers' capacity to apply evidence-based strategies in their language and literacy instruction.…

This NFER report has been produced for the Education Endowment Foundation and its evaluation of a speaking and listening intervention combining two programmes: the Vocabulary Enrichment Intervention Programme (VEIP) and the narrative Intervention Programme (NIP). The intervention was used with pupils who needed extra support to improve their…

Recent literature reviews have highlighted the need to better understand the relation between speaker and listener behavior when teaching learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study used a modified parallel-treatments design to compare directly the degree to which tact and listener behavior emerged during instruction in the…

What makes a leader successful? As the Director of Research at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center's (VICC) Clinical Trials Office, the author had to think of new ways to engage employees when becoming the director nearly 15 years ago. The staff started a GLUE (Greater Loyalty Utilizing Empowerment) Committee. The committee was established to help…

Most spoken texts that are used in second language (L2) listening classroom activities are scripted texts, where the text is written, revised, polished, and then read aloud with artificially clear enunciation and slow rate of speech. This article explores the field's overreliance on these scripted texts, at the expense of including unscripted…

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to compare the perception of Japanese vowel length contrasts by 4 groups of listeners who differed in their familiarity with length contrasts in their first language (L1; i.e., American English, Italian, Japanese, and Thai). Of the 3 nonnative groups, native Thai listeners were expected to outperform…

Purpose: In this article, a new signal-processing algorithm is proposed and evaluated for the suppression of the combined effects of reverberation and noise. Method: The proposed algorithm decomposes, on a short-term basis (every 20 ms), the reverberant stimuli into a number of channels and retains only a subset of the channels satisfying a…

Purpose: This study assessed selective listening for speech in individuals with and without unilateral hearing loss (UHL) and the potential relationship between spatial release from informational masking and localization ability in listeners with UHL. Method: Twelve adults with UHL and 12 normal-hearing controls completed a series of monaural and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated how well experts can adjust the settings of a commercial noise-reduction system to optimize the intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners. Method: In Experiment 1, 5 experts adjusted parameters for a noise-reduction system while aiming to optimize intelligibility. The stimuli consisted of…