Background: Adults presenting with unrepaired cleft palate are not a rare occurrence in middle-income countries. However, many surgeons are hesitant to operate on these individuals because of the challenges in repairing the wide adult cleft palate, as well as concerns regarding any improvement in speech in older patients. Unfortunately, the…

An increasing number of studies are exploring the benefits of automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based dictation programs for second language (L2) pronunciation learning (e.g. Chen, Inceoglu & Lim, 2020; Liakin, Cardoso & Liakina, 2015; McCrocklin, 2019), but how ASR recognizes accented speech and the nature of the feedback it provides to…

Background: Ultrasound visual biofeedback (UVBF) has the potential to be useful for the treatment of compensatory errors in speakers with cleft palate ± lip (CP±L), but there is little research on its effectiveness, or on how acceptable families find the technique. This study reports on parents' and children's perspectives on taking part in a…

Background: There is a global need for synthetic speech development in multiple languages and dialects, as many children who cannot communicate using their natural voice struggle to find synthetic voices on high-technology devices that match their age, social and linguistic background. Aims: To document multiple stakeholders' perspectives…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

To examine speaker role models (SRMs) in second language acquisition (SLA), this study explored the sociolinguistic "English as a lingua franca" (ELF) perspective targeting international intelligibility. Thus, it examined the way ELF learners align with self-selected English speakers and anonymous (audio-recorded) English speakers as…

Voice banking involves recording an inventory of sentences produced via natural speech. The recordings are used to create a synthetic text-to-speech voice that can be installed on speech-generating devices. This study highlights a minimally researched, clinically relevant issue surrounding the development and evaluation of Singaporean-accented…

It has been shown in the past that International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) struggle with phonological and communication issues in the classroom (Pickering, 1999; 2001). This issue leads to misunderstandings between ITAs and undergraduate students, frustrating them both as well as the parents of the students and the departments. However, studies…

This study investigates strategies employed by East Asian international students to cope with comprehension barriers caused by different types of English accents. While these students face a range of comprehension barriers caused by unfamiliar accented English (from both native speakers and speakers of other languages), little is known about how…

Purpose: The aim of this research note is to introduce a new appraisal form, the Classroom Communication and Collaboration (C3) Appraisal, designed to evaluate communication and collaboration within classroom settings. Method: A comprehensive synthesis of the key skills from a broad range of publications on successful communication and…

This study tracked the development of Hong Kong's assessment practices for English pronunciation over the past four decades, with reference to the nativeness and intelligibility principles in L2 pronunciation research and pedagogy. Specifically, it evaluated changes in assessors' comments on candidates' English pronunciation performance in…

Purpose: This article describes the developmental trajectories of four communication-related parameters (i.e., intelligibility, articulation rate, fluency, and communicative efficiency) in a cross-sectional study of typically developing children between 3 and 9 years. The four target parameters were related to auditory-perceptual parameters of…

Few studies have investigated how individuals with partially intelligible speech choose to communicate, including how, when, and why they might use a speech-generating device (SGD). This study aimed to add to the literature by exploring how this group of individuals use different communication strategies. Qualitative interviews were carried out…

During dialogue, people reach mutual comprehension through the production of feedback markers such as "yeah" or "okay." The purpose of the current study was to determine if mental load affects feedback production, as there is currently no consensus as to how mental load constrains the way in which dialogue partners reach mutual…

Upon hearing someone's speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker's age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure…