The main purpose of this study is to explore and examine an early bilingual child whose use of English might be different on the account of the context the child uses English. Specifically, it was sought to find out if the child resorted to different phonological varieties as well as different interaction patterns while communicating. The relevant…

Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

The auditory system helps regulate phonation. A speaker's perception of their own voice is likely to be of both emotional and functional significance. Although many investigations have observed deviating voice qualities in individuals who are prelingually deaf or profoundly hearing impaired, less is known regarding how older adults with acquired…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

This paper illustrates how an "experimental state of mind", i.e. principles of experimental design, can inform hypothesis generation and testing in structured fieldwork elicitation. The application of these principles is demonstrated with case studies in toneme discovery. Pike's classic toneme discovery procedure is shown to be a special…

This study explored the feasibility of training school teaching assistants to provide the treatment, Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing to treat childhood apraxia of speech (CAS, also known as developmental verbal dyspraxia). The study used a single case experimental design across behaviours and a qualitative evaluation of teaching assistant…

The present trend in developing and using semi-direct speaking tests has been supported by test developers and researchers' claim of their increased practicality, higher reliability and concurrent validity with test scores in direct oral proficiency interviews. However, it is universally agreed within the language testing and assessment community…

This paper presents specific reference tools to provide institutional language integrated support with a specific language plan for a bilingual programme at the University of Malaga. This follows experts' opinions that claim the need of such a plan. While studies show the importance of language support in bilingual instruction, they rarely address…

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 study details the development of six second language learners in an English listening course that focused on developing their bottom-up listening skills. The research employed longitudinal multi-case studies to chart the development of these lower proficiency-level Taiwanese university learners, and their progress in the course was analysed…

Swedish has a complicated prosodic system, compared, for example, with English. A large proportion of Swedish children with language impairment (LI) have prosodic problems to some extent. There are few descriptions in the literature of prosody intervention, which means that clinicians must rely on their overall linguistic and therapeutic knowledge…

Background: Physical education teacher behaviour has been a subject of study in physical education including physical education teacher education for 30 years. However, the research on teacher behaviour has tended to focus on direct teaching behaviour (DTB) to demonstrate the benefits of effective teaching, centred on a technical understanding of…

In line with a communicative curriculum for English, it is claimed that communicative competence involves knowledge about when and how to display affectivity in talk-in-interaction. Typically, interjections have been described as a lexical means for expressions of emotion. A survey of textbooks canonical of EFL at German elementary and secondary…

Prosodic information aids segmentation of the continuous speech signal and thereby facilitates auditory speech processing. Durational and pitch variations are prosodic cues especially necessary to convey prosodic boundaries, but alaryngeal speakers have inconsistent control over acoustic parameters such as F0 and duration, being as a result noisy…

Detailed research concerning the issue fluency, specifically relating to pauses, mean length runs, and fluency rates in Japanese EFL learners, is limited. Furthermore, the issue of tracking fluency gains has often been ignored, misunderstood or minimized in EFL educational research. The present study, which is based on six monologues conducted…