Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the understanding of English sentences produced by native (English) and nonnative (Spanish) talkers by listeners with normal hearing (NH) and listeners with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Sentence recognition in noise was measured in adult subjects with CIs and subjects with NH, all of whom were…

English has assumed a new role in international communication in recent decades, that is, as a Lingua Franca (ELF) among speakers with different first languages. This study attempts to investigate and analyze Chinese university students' perception and production of paired English fricatives from the perspective of ELF. By using a listening…

A central issue in language testing is the choice of norms, and the need to reconcile notions of "standard" English with local language norms and features. Data from studies of international intelligibility indicate that some features of "standard" language descriptions, based on native-speaker language use, are not essential…

Purpose: In this study, the authors proposed and tested a preliminary speech and language classification system for children with cerebral palsy. Method: Speech and language assessment data were collected in a laboratory setting from 34 children with cerebral palsy (CP; 18 male, 16 female) with a mean age of 54 months (SD = 1.8). Measures of…

The purpose of this study is to measure the comprehensibility of the Expanding Circle nations' citizens, namely Burmese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Laotians, Thais and Vietnamese towards the Outer Circle Englishes, namely Bruneian English, Malaysian English. Philippine English and Singaporean English. Ten universities in the Expanding Circle that…

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine how 120 highly experienced EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in Japan adjust their pronunciation in order to facilitate and refine their students' learning skills to approach mutual intelligibility in second language (L2) classrooms (i.e. "pronunciation-specific teacher talk").…

This study investigated the impact of a well-defined behavioral dysarthria treatment on acoustic and perceptual measures of speech in four adults with dysarthria secondary to stroke. A single-subject A-B-A experimental design was used to measure the effects of the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT[R]LOUD) on the speech of individual…

Purpose: Although surveys are usually piloted before fielding, cognitive-based testing of surveys is not standard practice in nursing home (NH) research. Many terms used in the literature do not have standard definitions and may be interpreted differently by researchers, respondents, and policy makers. The purpose of this study was to ensure that…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of noise and speech intelligibility on the processing of speech produced from native English; high-intelligibility, Korean-accented English; and moderate-intelligibility, Korean-accented English speakers. Method: Both listener comprehension, determined by accuracy judgment on true/false sentences, and…

This study examined the intelligibility of speech produced by 17 children (aged 4-11 years) with cochlear implants. Stimulus items included sentences from the Beginners' Intelligibility Test (BIT) and words from the Children Speech Intelligibility Measure (CSIM). Naive listeners responded by writing sentences heard or with two types of responses…

This study reports on the linguistic behaviour of 39 university students from Moravia (in the east of the Czech Republic) living at a hall of residence in Prague, Bohemia (an area covering the west/central parts of the Czech Republic). In Bohemia, Moravian dialects and Standard Czech (SC)--an archaic and semi-artificial standard dialect that is…

Over the past few decades, research has demonstrated the important role that prosody (i.e., stress, rhythm, intonation) plays in the intelligibility of speakers of English as a second language (ESL). Yet the impact of this research on teacher cognition--the beliefs and knowledge that teachers possess in relation to their classroom practices--has…

This paper analyses consonant articulation errors in dysarthric speech produced by seven American-English native speakers with cerebral palsy. Twenty-three consonant phonemes were transcribed with diacritics as necessary in order to represent non-phoneme misarticulations. Error frequencies were examined with respect to six variables: articulatory…

The English as an International Language (EIL) research movement that has appeared due to the increasing number of non-native speakers outnumbering the native English speakers seems to challenge some of the traditional assumptions in ELT. Within the scope of ELT curriculum development, this study aims to argue against two of the traditional…