This paper explores what the measures of utterance fluency typically employed in Automatic Speech Evaluation (ASE), i.e. automated speaking assessments, tell us about oral proficiency. 60 Chinese learners of English completed the second part of the speaking section of IELTS and six tasks designed to measure the linguistic knowledge and processing…

Language testing is witnessing increasing interest in the potential for AI to support test development and validation. To date, published research involving AI in language testing has typically been conducted in the context of high-stakes proficiency tests and the potential for this technology to support local language testing is under-researched.…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate whether preschool- and early school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) have difficulties with speech perception. Method: Systematic searching of 8 electronic databases identified 73 eligible studies across 71 articles examining the…

Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) represent a large number of speech and language therapists' caseloads. The intervention with children who have SSD can involve different therapy approaches, and these may be articulatory or phonologically based. Some international studies reveal a widespread application of articulatory based approaches in…

This study investigates the effects of a short-term pedagogic intervention on development of second language (L2) fluency among learners studying English for academic purposes at a UK university. It also examines the interaction between development of fluency and complexity and accuracy. Through a pretest and posttest design, data were collected…

Although it is relatively well established that access to orthographic codes in production tasks is possible via an autonomous link between meaning and spelling (e.g., Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997), the relative contribution of phonology to orthographic access remains unclear. Two experiments demonstrated persistent repetition priming in…

Fourteen-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words (N. Mani & K. Plunkett (2007), "Journal of Memory and Language", 57, 252; D. Swingley & R. N. Aslin (2002), "Psychological Science", 13, 480). To examine the development of this sensitivity further, the current study…

Background: School-aged children with persisting speech sound disorders (SSDs) may show little improvement in speech accuracy following phonological or articulation therapy. Aims: To determine the effects of establishing consonant production in facilitative vowel contexts for a 7-year-old boy (CD) with persisting post-alveolar fronting. CD had…

Three dual-task experiments investigated the capacity demands of phoneme selection in picture naming. On each trial, participants named a target picture (Task 1) and carried out a tone discrimination task (Task 2). To vary the time required for phoneme selection, the authors combined the targets with phonologically related or unrelated distractor…

Using English as a global communicating tool makes Taiwanese people have to speak in English in diverse international situations. However, consonants and vowels in English are not all effortless for them to articulate. This phonological reduction study explores concepts about phonological (articulating system) approximation. From Taiwanese folks'…

Background: Acquired progressive dysarthria is traditionally assessed, rated, and researched using measures of speech perception and intelligibility. The focus is commonly on the individual with dysarthria and how speech deviates from a normative range. A complementary approach is to consider the features and consequences of dysarthric speech as…

Articulation disorders in Down's syndrome (DS) are prevalent and often intractable. Individuals with DS generally prefer visual to auditory methods of learning and may therefore find it beneficial to be given a visual model during speech intervention, such as that provided by electropalatography (EPG). In this study, participants with Down's…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…