This study analyzes the use of role-play as an elicitation device for the evaluation of a nonnative speaker's oral language. In this analysis of role-play as a methodology to generate data for assessment purposes, the study examines the role that interlocutors play in two types of interactions. It raises questions about the validity and…

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

Background and Aims: The current study is a first investigation reporting the speech production characteristics of an early deafened adult cochlear implant user after a course of speech-language treatment. Methods and Procedures: The participant is culturally deaf and received the cochlear implant when she was 43 years old. A 24-week ABCABC…

For several decades the intellectual abilities of deaf children and adolescents, as measured by performance IQ, have been reported as comparable with those of hearing children and adolescents. Differences have been reported, however, on measures of verbal IQ, with deaf children and adolescents typically obtaining verbal IQ scores within the low…

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. "no sleep", "not see", "can't reach") from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3-3;4 (MLU 2.05-3.1) and his mother. The…

Every day students are able to discuss complex ideas relatively easily in spontaneous conversation, yet when they attempt to express complex ideas in a written paper, students often experience great difficulty. The features of face-to-face conversation and of written communication differ in a number of respects. This study examines student's…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles of adolescent and young adult readers whose educational and occupational prospects are constrained by their limited literacy skills. We explore the relationships among reading-related abilities in participants ages 16 to 24 years spanning a wide range…

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to…

Background: Research on the presentation of information in narrative versus expository text genres is inconclusive with respect to the question of which is more beneficial for student learning. Aims: We examine the effect of presenting factual content in either narrative or expository genres on student learning. We also consider relevant prior…

Purpose: L. E. Bernstein, M. E. Demorest, and P. E. Tucker (2000) demonstrated enhanced speechreading accuracy in participants with early-onset hearing loss compared with hearing participants. Here, the authors test the generalization of Bernstein et al.'s (2000) result by testing 2 new large samples of participants. The authors also investigated…

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. "Language and Speech, 22," 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on…

Realistic spoken discourse, as it actually is used in real-life situations, would not be acceptable in the written medium: the established conventions of the written medium are not adequately equipped to convey the phonological subtleties and undertones of speech. Novelists use dialogue to imitate or mirror reality, but writing carries with it…

Communication scholars have dichotomized language into orality and literacy, with orality being the language of the "concrete" and literacy being the language of the "abstract." However, the human experience of language is not that simplistic. In daily linguistic patterns, written words and the "literal" are not…

Literacy is examined from the viewpoint of systemic linguistics. It is proposed that "literacy" means intervening in the social processes by working with written language, and this can not be accomplished by an individual alone. "Using written language" can not be isolated from "using language." While sociologically,…