Explores the phenomenon of second language speech fluency and how it may be facilitated through instruction. An overview of research on fluency in second language speech is presented; empirical research is discussed in light of psycholinguistic knowledge about mental processes underlying second language production, and a model is posited that…

Describes two experiments that examined the acquisition of second language lexical fluency. Considers the implications of these results for models of the developing lexicon. (Author/VWL)

Compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. (Author/VWL)

Many studies have found that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) perform significantly worse than normal controls on verbal fluency tasks. Moreover, some studies have found that AD patients' deficits compared to controls are more severe for semantic fluency (e.g., vegetables) than for letter fluency (e.g. words that begin with F). These…

Disfluencies include editing terms such as "uh" and "um" as well as repeats and revisions. Little is known about how disfluencies are processed, and there has been next to no research focused on the way that disfluencies affect structure-building operations during comprehension. We review major findings from both computational linguistics and…

The current study addresses the debate between so-called "structural" and "processing limitation" accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the "loss" of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to…

Nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English. By contrast, only a small minority of their parents describe themselves as skilled English speakers. This finding of a dramatic increase in English-language ability from one generation of Hispanics to the next emerges from a new analysis of…

The majority of high-stakes tests from elementary school through postsecondary education include the timed impromptu essay as a measure of writing performance. For adolescents with writing disorders, this type of evaluation often presents a significant barrier. The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, we investigated the influence of…

When mental health clinicians perform mental status examinations, they examine the language patterns of patients because abnormal language patterns, sometimes referred to as language dysfluency, may indicate a thought disorder. Performing such examinations with deaf patients is a far more complex task, especially with traditionally underserved…

This study compares pauses, repetitions and recasts in matched task interactions under face-to-face and computer-mediated conditions. Six first-year English undergraduates at a Turkish University took part in Skype-based voice chat with a native speaker and face-to-face with their instructor. Preliminary quantitative analysis of transcripts showed…

This study examined the impact of various degenerative dementias on access to semantic knowledge and the status of semantic representations. Patients with semantic dementia, primary progressive aphasia, and Alzheimer's disease were compared with elderly controls on tasks of category and letter fluency, with number of words generated, mean lexical…

This article focuses on the historical development of Kahuawaiola Indigenous Teacher Education Program, the first teacher education program specifically addressing the needs of Hawaiian medium education. The authors distinguish a P-12 language revitalization education approach from those of transitional bilingual and foreign language immersion…

A powerful tool for creating culture while, at the same time, a cognitively rigorous exercise, Indigenous-language immersion could be a key for producing both language fluency and academic success in culture-based schools. Drawing on seven years of critical ethnographic research at Ojibwe schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin, this researcher…

A study examined the relative contributions of age, sex, and education to verbal and nonverbal fluency in a normal population. Sixty-seven subjects aged 12 to 71 years performed paper-and-pencil tasks proven to be dependent on the right and left hemispheric modalities of the frontal lobes. Multiple t-tests were applied to determine whether…

This study analyzed overlap (or interruption behavior) in conversations between mothers and their stuttering children to determine how overlap relates to fluency. Subjects for the study, which is part of the Genesis of Stuttering Project, were 20 preschool stuttering children and their mothers. Three forms of overlap were examined: simultaneous…