Two experiments served to test the hypothesis that partially masking speech with pink noise (Experiment 1) or speech babble (Experiment 2) induces particularly pronounced metacognitive illusions in judgments about the distracting effects of task-irrelevant speech on cognitive performance. We hypothesized that the experimental manipulations would…

Language production and the execution of motor acts have long been thought to have similarities in the rules of their execution. Recent studies have begun to directly compare these two processes by measuring certain phenomena found in both. Until now, comparisons have only been made in parallel, with different groups of participants and/or tasks.…

Background: Speech differences may occur between motor subtypes of Parkinson's disease (PD), but the literature remains limited. Aims: Examine speech characteristics in individuals with PD across the tremor-dominant, nontremor-dominant and mixed subtypes comparing to healthy controls. Methods and Procedures: A total of 115 individuals with PD were…

Private speech is a cognitive tool to guide thinking and behavior, yet its regulatory use in atypical development remains equivocal. This study investigated the influence of task difficulty on private speech in preschool children with attention or language difficulties. Measures of private speech use, form and content were obtained while 52…

The developmental, characteristics and educational competencies of students who need special education are developing slowly in compared to their agemates. This is because their expressive language is different. In order to overcome these challenges, assistive technologies can be used under the supervision of the teachers. In this paper, a person…

Background: Humans often use co-speech gestures to promote effective communication. Attention has been paid to the cortical areas engaged in the processing of co-speech gestures. Aims: To investigate the neural network underpinned in the processing of co-speech gestures and to observe whether there is a relationship between areas involved in…

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

Background: The detection and description of language impairments in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's Disease (AD) play an important role in research, clinical diagnosis and intervention. Various methodological protocols have been implemented for the assessment of morphosyntactic abilities in AD; narrative discourse elicitation tasks…

Previous research has shown that task repetition can positively affect L2 oral performance. However, few studies have explored the effects of task repetition on young EFL learners' production. Also, task repetition research has paid little attention to effects of "spacing" examined through longer time intervals between the two occasions…

Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

Background: Despite its importance, in-depth analysis of connected speech is often neglected in the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) -- especially for the logopenic variant (lvPPA) for which unreliable differential diagnosis has been documented. Only a few studies have been conducted on this topic in lvPPA. Aims: The aim of this…

This study investigates the acquisition of sociophonetic competence by English as a foreign language learners in production and perception. Adult learners of English completed speaking, listening, and questionnaire tasks, aimed at assessing their acquisition of sociolinguistic constraints on (ING). First, they were interviewed and read 30…

Purpose: Contemporary motor theories indicate that well-practiced movements are best performed automatically, without conscious attention or monitoring. We applied this perspective to speech production in school-age children and examined how dual-task conditions that engaged sustained attention affected speech fluency, speech rate, and language…

The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect-speaking and…

The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive…