The purpose of this qualitative heuristic case study (supported by quantitative data) was to investigate the change in reading comprehension after implementation of a fluency intervention. The study participants were five students on tier 2 of the Response to Intervention pyramid. The study was guided by three research questions. RQ1: Why does…

The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2…

Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

Design of a screening test for identifying reading difficult students in Malayalam and validation thereof among boys is made to help schools proactively intervene with such students. A battery of tests developed based on extant literature on screening tests, reviewed difficulties in reading Malayalam, and discrimination power of the draft tests is…

National reports reveal one third of American fourth graders read below basic level on measures of comprehension. One critical component of comprehension is fluency: rapid, accurate, expressive reading with automaticity and prosody. Many fluency studies and classroom interventions focus only on reading rate, but this alone is not sufficient. This…

The work described in this report is the second phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondaryschool algebra-levelmath expressions insynthesized speech that is useful for studentswithblindnessor lowvision.This report describes the development and results of the second feedback study performed for our project,…

The current work offers a comprehensive examination of stress and tone in ten Indo-Aryan languages, providing novel analyses within Optimality Theory. The languages are divided into three categories: those in which tone is attracted to stress; those in which stress is attracted to tone; and those in which no interaction between stress and tone…

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)-Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were…

This study investigated English speakers' perception of Mandarin sounds, aiming to answer three major questions. First, does the perceived similarity between Mandarin and English sounds affect learners' acquisition of Mandarin sounds? Second, do the groups with different amounts of Mandarin experience differ in their perception of…

Purpose: We explored the reliability and validity of 2 quantitative approaches to document presence and severity of speech properties associated with apraxia of speech (AOS). Method: A motor speech evaluation was administered to 39 individuals with aphasia. Audio-recordings of the evaluation were presented to 3 experienced clinicians to determine…

Abundant research has shown that encoding meaningful gesture, such as an iconic gesture, enhances memory. This paper asked whether gesture needs to carry meaning to improve memory recall by comparing the mnemonic effect of meaningful (i.e., iconic gestures) and nonmeaningful gestures (i.e., beat gestures). Beat gestures involve simple motoric…

Recent literature has sought to understand the presence of epenthetic vowels after the productions of postvocalic word-final consonants by second language (L2) learners whose first languages (L1s) restrict the presence of obstruents in coda position. Previous models include those in which epenthesis is seen as a strategy to mitigate the effects of…

How well can non-native length contrasts for vowels and for consonants be perceived and is one type more difficult than the other? Three listener groups (native Italian and German as well as advanced German learners of Italian) performed a speeded same-different task involving vocalic and consonantal length contrasts as well as segmental contrasts…

Purpose: To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and…