This study investigates the intelligibility of English with mora-timed rhythm or Japanese Katakana Hatsuon Eigo among NNSs living in a multilingual community, utilizing shadowing to measure the concept of intelligibility. Eighty-six participants (10 Malay NSs, 28 Mandarin NSs, and 30 Tamil NSs) were asked to shadow a recording of a 300-word…

The rise of medical tourism and the increasing number of international patients from Asian countries have led Thai healthcare professionals to serve a lot of Asian patients and to encounter a complexity of language use in their workplace. There is a necessity for these professionals to strive for an understanding of Asian accents spoken by the…

As English becomes an established lingua franca in the ASEAN region, what should be the pedagogical approach to oral skills and pronunciation teaching in the region? Should teachers target common features and patterns developing in ASEAN English or target more "Western" pronunciation? This study strives to balance the discussion of the…

This study examined the parental and spousal self-efficacy (SE) of adults who are deaf and who are hard of hearing (d/hh) in relation to their speech intelligibility. Forty individuals with hearing loss completed self-report measures: Spousal SE in a relationship with a spouse who was hearing/deaf, parental SE to a child who was hearing/deaf, and…

In the context of English as a global language in which the interaction is not only between native speakers and ESL speakers but also among non-native speakers themselves, there is a need to investigate how well L2 listeners can judge and successfully comprehend accented English produced by other L2 speakers; particularly, how the specific…

The study focused on social competence (SC) and perceived sense of loneliness of preschool children with hearing loss (HL) in group inclusion (GI, a small group of children with HL is integrated in a standard classroom) and individual inclusion (II, each child with HL is individually integrated into a standard classroom). The relations between…

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…

This paper identifies several key issues that have emerged through the debate over English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and suggests a practice-based perspective--which treats language not as a fixed system but as an emergent product of speakers' practices--as a guide for reconsidering some fundamental assumptions of the ELF research project. In…

Background: Newborn hearing screening, early intervention programs, and advancements in cochlear implant and hearing aid technology have greatly increased opportunities for children with hearing loss to become intelligible talkers. Optimizing speech intelligibility requires that progress be monitored closely. Although direct assessment of…

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…

This paper investigates how the presence of a minority language closely related to the majority language is received and treated on the World Wide Web. Specifically, it deals with the acceptability and treatment of texts written in Slovak in the .cz domain, which belongs to the Czech Republic, more than a decade after the split of Czechoslovakia.…

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…