This paper provides a research synthesis of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) -- that is, cloud-based virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri -- for second language (L2) learning. The article also offers a theoretical justification for the use of IPAs in language learning and outlines the affordances and constraints of…

Recent neurophysiological theories propose that the cerebral hemispheres collaborate to resolve the complex temporal nature of speech, such that left-hemisphere (or bilateral) gamma-band oscillatory activity would specialize in coding information at fast rates (phonemic information), whereas right-hemisphere delta- and theta-band activity would…

Lies and irony are paradigmatic examples of nonliteral communication; many deaf children and even adults have difficulty in understanding them. The present study assessed the understanding of lies and irony in 96 adolescents living in Spain in urban settings (58 deaf participants, 38 hearing participants; 10-19 years old). We investigated whether…

Purpose: We sought to establish normative growth curves for intelligibility development for the speech of typically developing children as revealed by objectively based orthographic transcription of elicited single-word and multiword utterances by naïve listeners. We also examined sex differences, and we compared differences between single-word…

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…

A problem exists in the inequitable opportunities experienced by nonnative accented students in terms of academics, belongingness, and self-efficacy because of accent bias in the United States high schools. The purpose of this qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis was to explore accent bias for nonnative-accented students in a high…

Background: Speech intelligibility is a global indicator of the severity of a speech problem. It is a measure that has been used frequently in research and clinical assessment of speech. Previous studies have shown that factors, such as measurement method and listener experience, can influence speech intelligibility scores. However, these factors…

Speech is extremely variable along many different dimensions. One source of variability listeners often encounter is accented speech, in which phonological units can systematically differ from the listener's native categories. This dissertation presents five experiments testing how listeners adapt to accent-based phonological variability,…

This study examines L2 speakers' accent attitudes in relation to their linguistic profile and current practices, recruiting 107 multilingual postgraduate students of 34 different nationalities enrolled in leading research universities in Japan. The participants completed a survey regarding their perceptions of different English varieties in…

In this paper a context where receptive multilingualism represents a communicative strategy of adjustment in a context of second language acquisition is discussed. The traditional scope of receptive multilingualism has been extended to multilingual environments resulting from an experience of mobility, namely transnational adoptive families.…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of an intensive voice treatment Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT LOUD) on children with Down syndrome (DS) and motor speech disorders. Method: A Phase I, multiple baseline, single-subject design with replication across nine participants with DS was used. Single-word intelligibility, acoustic measures of…

Although intelligibility is a core concept in second language (L2) speech assessment and teaching research, the vast majority of previous work relies on audio-only stimuli. The current study set out to examine how linguistic and visual information jointly interact to determine the degree of speech intelligibility. Both first language (L1) and L2…

Purpose: This study investigated whether listener processing of dysarthric speech requires the recruitment of more cognitive resources (i.e., higher levels of listening effort) than neurotypical speech. We also explored relationships between behavioral listening effort, perceived listening effort, and objective measures of word transcription…

Background: Speech is the most common method of communication. Video-based clinical communication evaluation is a requirement for children with speech-language impairments living in rural areas, and those who have limited mobility. Aims: To determine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Viking Speech Scale (VSS-T) via live…

Our everyday language use is mostly intuitive (Lieberman, 2000), in the sense of tacit and automatic, and it reveals ourselves in what we say and how we say it. In this study I use the interaction order--the idea that social facts such as identity are constituted by social interaction--to interpret a research interview that was threatened by my…