Background: Acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) involves speech-production deficits on both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Recent research has identified a non-linear interaction between the metrical structure of bisyllabic words and word-production accuracy in German speakers with AOS, with trochaic words (strong-weak stress) being…

Background: During grammatical treatment of children with developmental language disorder (DLD), it is natural for therapists to focus on the grammatical details of the target language that give the children special difficulty. However, along with the language-specific features of the target (e.g., for English, add -s to verbs in present tense,…

Although prosodic deficits have been reported to occur with many different populations, little published research addresses treatment options for these deficits. This study was designed to examine one treatment's impact, the six-step imitative approach, on the expressive affective prosody of an adolescent with autism who had average intelligence…

Background: Stress production is important for effective communication, but this skill is frequently impaired in people with motor speech disorders. The literature reports successful treatment of these deficits in this population, thus highlighting the therapeutic potential of this area. However, no specific guidance is currently available to…

Traditionally, pronunciation was taught by reference to native-speaker models. However, as speakers around the world increasingly interact in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts, there is less focus on native-speaker targets, and there is wide acceptance that achieving intelligibility is crucial while mimicking native-speaker pronunciation…

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, oe/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences…

The present study investigated the efficacy of segmental/suprasegmental vs. holistic pronunciation instruction in the development of listening comprehension skills by EFL learners, using a pre-test post-test design. Six groups of 20 intermediate EFL learners at a university in Iran took part in the study, all groups receiving the same amount of…

This study examined whether, and if so how, L1 and L2 segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness is longitudinally related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Using a regression approach, we identified five types of comprehenders, i.e., 11 poor-Chinese/average-English…

Objective: We aimed to investigate the production of contrastive emphasis in French-speaking 4-year-olds and adults. Based on previous work, we predicted that, due to their immature motor control abilities, preschool-aged children would produce smaller articulatory differences between emphasized and neutral syllables than adults. Method: Ten…

Besides numerous positive transformations and unique opportunities in language pedagogy, the post-method era brought with itself several challenges for language teachers. After intensive research and empirical studies, the use of literature was welcomed in ELT classrooms. But the question arises as to what extent and in what ways does literature…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the effects of voice enthusiasm (enthusiastic voice vs calm voice) on social ratings of the speaker, cognitive load and transfer performance in multimedia learning. Design/methodology/approach: Two laboratory experiments were conducted in which learners learned from a multimedia presentation about computer…

This study considers the performance of tone pronunciation and morpheme intelligibility by L2 Polish Mandarin learners. A mixed-effects ordinal regression model and Tukey's HSD multiple test were used to examine the start-point, end-point, of syllables as a means of assessing their intelligibility by L2 Polish learners regarding the tones with the…

The importance of phonological awareness for the future learning of written language has been widely recognized, but there is still some debate as to whether syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic awareness are independent skills or manifestations of the same general skill. Consequently, the objective of this study was to test the independence of…

Lexical stress is the contrast between strong and weak syllables within words. Ballard et al. (2012) examined the amount of stress contrastivity across adjacent syllables in word productions of typically developing three- to seven-year-olds and adults. Here, eight- to eleven-year-olds are compared with the adults from Ballard et al. using acoustic…

Purpose: To compare vowel acoustics and intelligibility in words produced with and without contrastive stress by speakers with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (DYS[subscript CP]) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: Fifteen participants (9 men, 6 women; age M = 42 years) with DYS[subscript CP] and 15 HCs (9 men, 6…