To address the challenges of limited language proficiency and provide necessary feedback in the implementation of task-based language teaching (TBLT), a mobile-supported TBLT application was developed to provide linguistic and task scaffolding. Sixty-six English as a foreign language (EFL) university learners participated in a three-week…

Pronunciation features are not equal in how they affect listeners' ability to understand. Some are low value, while others are high value. This study explores whether contrastive stress is high value. Previous research has shown that identification of contrastive stress is learnable (Pennington & Ellis, 2000), and that explicit teaching about…

This study examined visual analog scaling judgments of disfluency by normal listeners in response to oral reading by 20 adults with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) and nondysphonic controls. Findings suggest that although dysfluency is not a defining feature of SD, it does contribute significantly to the overall clinical impression of severity of the…

Black children and White children were equally intelligible to Black adult listeners, while White adult listeners found White children significantly more intelligible than Black children. Noise deteriorated word discrimination scores of the Black and White listeners differently. (Author/RL)

Examines the effects of text practice and prosodic modeling on the reading rate, accuracy, expressiveness, and comprehension of disabled readers. Each subject read the first half of a set of stories three times under one of four experimental conditions. While reading performance improved across all conditions, substantial additional gains were…