Purpose: Auditory perceptual judgments are commonly used to diagnose dysarthria and assess treatment progress. The purpose of the study was to examine the acoustic underpinnings of perceptual speech abnormalities in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Auditory perceptual judgments were obtained from sentences produced by 13 speakers…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

The aim of the study was to explore the effect of Readers Theater on improving English reading prosody with L2 learners. The process of how reading prosody is improved through Readers Theater was examined. Sixty EFL undergraduate students, non-English majors, participated in this 6-week study. Two cycles of Readers Theater were implemented. Using…

The components involved in adolescent reading are complex and not clearly understood in struggling readers. Phrase reading, a language skill associated with prosodic understanding of syntactic phrases, has received little attention. We studied 70 adolescent readers including delayed readers to answer the following questions: (a) Do phrase-reading…

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…