Ultra-processed food consumption is a globally increasing trend (Pagliai et al., 2021) correlated with increased obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and all-cause mortality (Elizabeth et al., 2020). American college students consume twice as many calories from ultra-processed food, compared to minimally processed food (Juul et al., 2022),…

Metacognitive reasoning is central to decision-making. For every decision, we can also judge our trust in that decision, or our level of "confidence." The mechanisms and representations underlying reasoning about confidence remain debated. We test whether children rely on "processing fluency" to infer their own confidence: do…

Co-speech gesture in monolinguals has been linked to several cognitive processes: prompting memory stores, conveying spatial concepts, searching for lexical equivalents, and supporting rhythm and cohesion. The production of co-speech gesture also occurs in spoken language bilinguals. Studies have demonstrated that bilinguals fluent in American…

Purpose: The adaptation effect in stuttering, traditionally described as the reduction of stuttering moments over repeated readings, provides a context to investigate fluency facilitation as well as a relatively controlled means of comparing fluent speech in the immediate vicinity of words that were stuttered versus fluently produced. Acoustic…

Purpose: Stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and typical disfluencies (TDs) are both more likely to occur as utterance length increases. However, longer and shorter utterances differ by more than the number of morphemes: They may also serve different communicative functions or describe different ideas. Decontextualized language, or language that…

Ebian Yi wedding songs are essential to the Yi ethnic group's musical and cultural heritage, and they are traditionally performed during wedding ceremonies in Ebian Yi Autonomous County, Sichuan Province, China. This study examines the role of Ebian Yi wedding songs in promoting Chinese folk music literacy and the obstacles affecting their…

To respond to recent calls for examining oral fluency from a broader social and communicative perspective, the current study aimed at investigating the effects of task communicative function on second language (L2) and first language (L1) speakers' fluency. Designing tasks that represent three different communicative functions (congratulations,…

This study explored the effect of speaking task on midclause pausing characteristics in the L1 and L2 speech of the same speakers to gain further insights into the potential relationship between pause location and stages of speech production. Participants included English L1 learners of L2 French (n = 29) or Spanish (n = 27) from the publicly…

While deaf children learning American Sign Language (ASL) from deaf caregivers generally develop along typical trajectories, some have been skeptical that deaf children who have hearing caregivers--the majority of deaf children--can similarly benefit from ASL exposure. This study tracked ASL fluency and academic achievement among a large sample of…

The importance of vocabulary when speaking is not only demonstrated in models of second language speech production and speaking proficiency but also reflected in rating criteria and assessment scales. The present study examined and compared micro-level lexical information in a speaking task from two complementary stakeholders' perspectives…

Disfluencies such as pauses, "um"s, and "uh"s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different…

The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a…

This paper reports on the impact of an English as a Second Language (ESL) speaking activity--"the poster carousel"--on English learners' second language (L2) fluency. Two versions of the poster carousel were developed to observe the effect of talking about (a) the same poster three times (same-task repetition) or (b) three different…

In our action research projects as teacher educators, we focus on broadening preservice teachers' understandings about language diversity in mathematics classrooms, away from just improving students' fluency in the language of instruction. To undertake these projects, we developed a flexible analytical tool, for identifying those pedagogical…

The efficacy of the "integrated approach," which calls for the simultaneous integration of two varieties in teaching Arabic as a second language (L2), has not yet been rigorously examined, and the very few available studies suffer from many methodological limitations. The current study sought to bridge this gap in the literature by…