In everyday interaction interlocutors use pragmatic co-speech gestures to cooperatively construct conversation. Shrugs, one of the most common pragmatic gestures, communicate a remarkable array of seemingly unrelated or even contradictory meanings--agreement and disagreement, ignorance and obviousness, interest and disinterest, among others.…

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) can affect social interaction and communication as well as motor and cognitive processes. Speech is affected in PD, as is the control of voluntary eye movements which are thought to play an important role in 'turn taking' in conversation. Aims: This study aimed to measure eye movements during spoken…

Silence is not often recognized as a key component within dialogue. Dialogue within the classroom and other settings tend to focus on verbal forms of communication and neglect ways in which dialogue is imbued with silence. However, silence is not merely the absence of sound or speech. This activity explores silence as a multifaceted, literal, and…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' use of mediated immediacy in a syllabus to determine effects on students' communication apprehension with instructors and student out-of-class communication with instructors. Participants viewed either a basic course syllabus with high levels of mediated immediacy or low levels of mediated…

This project explores the impacts of emojis on students' impressions when used in a course welcome email. We adopt a 4 x 3 factorial design to determine how different emojis (i.e., [winking face emoji], [face-with-tears-of-joy emoji], [tongue-sticking-out face emoji]) impact students' impressions of credibility, immediacy, and liking. Data from…

This dissertation is an effort to better understand Black children's conceptions of smartness and the ways that teachers communicate smartness through their practice. Here, I reimagine smartness as a verb rather than a noun--that is, smartness is about what one does that is smart. I develop a conceptual framework that attends to race, mathematics,…

Deixis -- a fundamental part of communication -- involves combinations of speech, gesture and eye-gaze, yet little is known about the temporal dynamics of this coordination. The authors analysed eye-gaze, pointing gestures and verbal productions in 514 deictic episodes during triadic, semi-naturalistic, book-reading sessions performed by Italian…

Gender differences are manifested not only in the physiological characteristics of a person, but also in the speech communication. This article presents the research data obtained at the phonetic and lexical levels of the language. The purpose of this work is to determine the speech characteristics that distinguish men and women at the studied…

Autistic people often show difficulty with facial expression recognition. However, the degree of difficulty varies widely, which might reflect varying symptom profiles. We examined three domains of autistic traits in the typical population and found that more autistic-like social skills were associated with greater difficulty labelling…

This study aimed to identify teacher perceptions of the causes of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) through feedback, and what feedback strategies teachers use to reduce FLCA. Feedback can be both a cause of FLCA and help to reduce FLCA. It is therefore important for teachers to understand how their feedback can affect FLCA. In the present…

Social deception games are games that involve players adopting roles and teams that are not known to all players of the game. One of the components of these types of games is deceiving other players for the purpose of completing goals and tasks. The focus of this case study is to show how social deception games were used to teach aspects of small…

The research aimed to outline the features of "new normal" communication behavior of young military leaders due to the COVID-19 pandemic influence. To study this critical problem we used some general scientific and empirical methods like literature analysis, synthesis and theoretical modelling, pedagogical experience, statistical data…

Metaphor is generally understood as the process of understanding one thing in terms of another. The activity described here is designed to make use of the principles of embodied cognition and meaning, and specifically the embodied nature of metaphor, to explore political discourse and communication. With high-school junior or senior students in…

Researchers have long established that people who believe they are attractive have higher self-esteem (Aronson & Linder, 1965). Recent studies show that students with higher self-esteem have less speaking apprehension (Elfering & Grebner, 2012). Teachers in higher education can help students rethink their attractiveness in an attempt to…

We examined direct and indirect paths involving receptive vocabulary and diversity of key consonants used in communication (DKCC) to improve understanding of why previously identified value-added predictors are associated with later expressive vocabulary for initially preverbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 87). Intentional…