Purpose: The objectives of this study were to identify acoustic characteristics of connected speech that differentiate children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) from typically developing children and to identify acoustic measures that best detect dysarthria in children with CP. Method: Twenty 5-year-old children with dysarthria…

Many scholars have investigated metadiscourse use in academic settings, but they have mostly explored written data, such as academic essays and research articles. However, spoken discourses like student presentations are rarely explored. Extant studies tend to focus on metadiscourse investigation in either native or non-native English learners'…

The study developed a model of linguistic constructs to predict writing quality for college basic writers and analyzed how those constructs changed following instruction. Analysis used a corpus of argumentative essays from a quasi-experimental, instructional study with 252 students (MacArthur, Philippakos, & Ianetta, 2015) that found large…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

Metadiscourse, or metatalk, is a discursive resource used in virtually any text or conversation to organize its content or signal the author's stance toward the content. Despite its prevalence in classroom talk, few have examined the role of metadiscourse and how it assists teachers and students to manage classroom communication of scientific…

Purpose: Current auditory training methods typically result in improvements to speech recognition abilities in quiet, but learner gains may not extend to other domains in speech (e.g., recognition in noise) or self-assessed benefit. This study examined the potential of training involving multiple talkers and training emphasizing discourse-level…

This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

Within the book of Job, the interlocutors (Job, the friends, and Yahweh) seem to largely ignore one another's arguments within their dialogical discourse. This observation leads some to propose that the dialogue lacks conceptual coherence. I argue that the interlocutors tangentially attend to previously stated points-of-view and attempt to…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

Over the last decade, psychological interventions, such as the values affirmation intervention, have been shown to alleviate the male-female performance difference when delivered in the classroom, however, attempts to scale the intervention are less successful. This study provides unique evidence on this issue by reporting the observed differences…

Writing is, at times, neglected by both teachers and students. Far too often, courses involve an emphasis on speaking skills and direct grammar instruction. These courses, however, pay little attention to writing skills and, most specifically, academic writing. In fact, while addressing writing, teachers may have different approaches, one of which…

Efforts to understand changes in language development and variations in language production across lifespan have increased considerably in the past several decades (Sankoff, 2017). In narrative discourse production, although several studies have reported age-related differences, the findings are not consistent. Additionally, previous research has…

Cohesion features were calculated for a corpus of 960 essays by 480 test-takers from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to examine differences in the use of cohesion devices between integrated (source-based) writing and independent writing samples. Cohesion indices were measured using an automated textual analysis tool, the…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Ewe language realizes cohesion by means of conjunctions in comparison with English as well as the similarities and differences in the way the two languages realize cohesion in this regard. The findings revealed that both English and Ewe realize cohesion by conjunction almost the same way. The…