Whether visual information belongs in second language (L2) listening tests has long been a subject for scholarly debate, with L2 learners' performance on and perceptions of video-based tests being the primary sources of evidence. The research into L2 teachers' perceptions, however, is scarce, as is the research into stakeholders' views of content…

Youth Liberation Army (YLA) is a youth-led grassroots organization advocating for school abolition and addressing issues most concerning young people in schools and communities. YLA utilizes adult ally trainings to invite educators to work toward liberatory education. The transformative organizing practices of YLA are examined through a youth…

Research has revealed the positive impact of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) on L2 learners' oral development and learning attitude. These studies, however, focused mostly on the in-class use of IPAs, with existing research on the out-of-class use being exploratory. To fill the gap of lacking empirical investigations on IPA-based autonomous…

Purpose: This study tested an assumption of the Natural Referent Vowel (Polka & Bohn, 2011) framework, namely, that directional asymmetries in adult vowel perception can be influenced by language experience. Method: Data from participants reported in Escudero and Williams (2014) were analyzed. Spanish participants categorized the Dutch vowels…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of chronic tinnitus on listening effort. Method: Thirteen normal-hearing young adults with chronic tinnitus were matched with a control group for age, gender, hearing thresholds, and educational level. A dual-task paradigm was used to evaluate listening effort in different…

Purpose: The aim of this experiment was to compare, for patients with cochlear implants (CIs), the improvement for speech understanding in noise provided by a monaural adaptive beamformer and for two interventions that produced bilateral input (i.e., bilateral CIs and hearing preservation [HP] surgery). Method: Speech understanding scores for…

Purpose: Studying the variations in speech levels with changing background noise level and talker-to-listener distance for talkers wearing hearing protection devices (HPDs) can aid in understanding communication in background noise. Method: Speech was recorded using an intra-aural HPD from 12 different talkers at 5 different distances in 3…

Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English. Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g.,…

Autistic traits vary across the general population, and are linked with face recognition ability. Here we investigated potential links between autistic traits and voice recognition ability for personally familiar voices in a group of 30 listeners (15 female, 16-19 years) from the same local school. Autistic traits (particularly those related to…

While it is well-established that listeners judge accents different from their own, and that this listener bias has pervasive consequences to the speakers, we have only offered a cursory attention to understand the nature of this accent bias. This paper explores listeners' judgments, ratings, and qualitative comments associated with psychosocial,…

Purpose: For elderly listeners, it is more challenging to listen to 1 voice surrounded by other voices than for young listeners. This could be caused by a reduced ability to use acoustic cues--such as slight differences in onset time--for the segregation of concurrent speech signals. Here, we study whether the ability to benefit from onset…

The aim of this study was to investigate the communication levels of the students who are studying in music education and preschool education in terms of music and different variables. The universe of the research is composed of students studying in the music education and preschool Department of Ataturk University Kazim Karabekir Faculty of…

Today, engaging in real language environments and exposing to the target culture often are seen as more appropriate to learn a second language. In this sense, movies in foreign language teaching are important audio-visual tools in terms of reflecting the language, culture, customs and traditions, clothes and lifestyle of a community. In language…

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for…

Speech perception involves fusion of multiple sensory inputs, but fusion is not automatic, likely depending on several external and internal factors (e.g., attention, noise, age). In this study, we exploited a specific paradigm in which a short audiovisual context made of coherent or incoherent speech material is displayed before an incongruent…