The present research reports the findings of three experiments which explore how subtitles and advance organizers affect EFL learners' listening comprehension of authentic videos. EFL learners are randomly assigned to one of two groups. The control group receives no treatment and the experimental group receives the experimental conditions of one…

With the increasing use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), it is no longer appropriate to associate English purely with "native-speaking" nations, but with a global community of users. This article reports on the use of listening journals in ELT to expose students to global Englishes (GE), a field that reflects the current global use…

In early stages of classroom language learning, many adult second language (L2) learners communicate primarily with one another, yet we know little about which speech stream characteristics learners tune into or the extent to which they understand this lingua franca communication. In the current study, 25 native English speakers learning German as…

Communication, specifically the elements crucial for normal social interaction, can be significantly affected in psychiatric illness, especially depression. Of specific importance are prosody (an aspect of speech that carries emotional valence) and formulaic language (non-novel linguistic segments that are prevalent in naturalistic conversation).…

Background: Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. Methods: This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children…

Emotions have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, we sought to document whether liking influences memory. A series of 6 experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts. In the general method, participants listened to a…

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm comprises the study of lists in which words (e.g., bed, pillow, etc.) are all associates of a single nonstudied critical item (e.g., sleep). The probability of falsely recalling or recognising nonstudied critical items is often similar to (or sometimes higher than) the probability of correctly recalling…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to investigate how differences in language ability relate to differences in processing talker information in the native language and an unfamiliar language by comparing performance for different ages and for groups with impaired language. Method: Three groups of native English listeners with typical…

Romer and Walker's "Appreciative Inquiry," which obtained input from 16 capable personal assistants, challenges some influential assumptions about personal assistance and opens a way to think about the demanding work of developing capable and committed personal assistants. Attempts to depersonalize the relationship between people…

Blind people can learn to understand speech at ultra-high syllable rates (ca. 20 syllables/s), a capability associated with hemodynamic activation of the central-visual system. To further elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying this skill, magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measurements during listening to sentence utterances were cross-correlated…

This pilot study explores differences in oral narrative comprehension abilities between children with moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss using hearing aids and their peers with typical hearing matched for age and gender. All children were between 3.5 and 5 years of age. Participants were read a patterned, illustrated storybook. Modified…

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when factoring out speaker characteristics such as sex, age, dialect, and so on. Some speakers share common features and can cohere into groups based on gross vocal similarity but, to date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based…

This study investigated the effects of a brief mindfulness meditation induction technique on perceived attention, aesthetic response, and flow during music listening as measured by Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) and questionnaire. Participants were students enrolled in music classes or ensembles at a comprehensive university in the…

In ordinary conversation, speakers experience pressures both to produce utterances suited to particular addressees and to do so with minimal delay. To document the impact of these conversational pressures, our experiment asked participants to produce brief utterances to describe visual displays. We complicated utterance planning by including…

Instructors from an Intensive English Program (IEP) conducted classroom observations in university courses commonly attended by international students to answer two questions: 1) What listening and speaking demands do international students face in courses at our university? 2) How can instructors in our IEP better prepare our students for these…