To facilitate early acquisition of effective teaching strategies, many deaf education teacher preparation programs provide students with opportunities to apply course concepts by working with children in practicum or field experiences. Providing students with guidance and feedback regarding their teaching efforts is an integral component of these…

Among teachers' various classroom discourse strategies, teacher questions are a powerful tool for guiding the linguistic and cognitive development of English as a second language (ESL) students (Gerstein, 1996; Gibbons, 2003). Because we do not know much about effective questioning strategies that support the growth of ESL students' thinking and…

The Kimberley Language Resource Centre (KLRC) earned its status over three decades as the representative body for Kimberley languages. In 2004, the organisation started to respond to grassroots concerns about the lack of language speakers in the younger generations. Aboriginal people are also connecting loss of languages to loss of bio-cultural…

A large number of non native speakers (NNS) of English from around the globe attend summer English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses in host countries before going on to further study. Such learners have expectations regarding the improvements that they will make in their speaking skills, not just in an academic context, but also in social…

Three general purposes of research in human development are to explain, predict, and modify behavior. Studies of listening during early childhood (birth through age eight) are of particular significance to the field because they enable researchers to describe listening processes from their very origins (explain), they demonstrate the effects of…

Increased immigration in Europe and worldwide has led to more pre- and primary school students being educated through the medium of a second language, and there is considerable research, much of it coming from Australia, to suggest that in order to cope with this situation, children will need to begin to acquire, from their earliest years in…

This study investigated the effects of introducing the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) on the frequency of requesting and commenting and the length of verbal utterances of two children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who presented with some spoken language, but limited use of language in communicative exchanges. A mixed research…

There is mounting evidence that phonological memory (PM), a sub-component of working memory, is closely related to various aspects of second language (L2) learning in a variety of populations, suggesting that PM may be an essential cognitive mechanism underlying successful L2 acquisition. This article provides a brief critical review of the role…

Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners…

Standardized passages used for speech nasalance measures may be too long for clinical use with very young or non-compliant patients. The aim of this study was to establish whether nasalance scores from shorter sections of three Swedish speech stimuli were equivalent to those from their corresponding whole stimulus. Nasalance recordings for three…

Speech-sign or "bimodal" bilingualism is exceptional because distinct modalities allow for simultaneous production of two languages. We investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon for models of language production by eliciting language mixing from eleven hearing native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Instead of switching…

This study examined the effects of using signs in spoken language vocabulary training of hard-of-hearing children. Fourteen hard-of-hearing children participated in the present study. Vocabulary training with the support of signs showed a statistically significant effect in the participants' learning and retention of new spoken language…

Controversy exists about whether dual-task interference from word planning reflects structural bottleneck or attentional control factors. Here, participants named pictures whose names could or could not be phonologically prepared, and they manually responded to arrows presented away from (Experiment 1), or superimposed onto, the pictures…

Purpose: The objective was to identify acoustic correlates of laryngeal muscle fatigue in conditions of vocal effort. Method: In a previous study, a technique of electromyography (EMG) served to define physiological signs of "voice fatigue" in laryngeal muscles involved in voicing. These signs correspond to spectral changes in contraction…

Mothers' mental state language in conversation with their preschool children, and children's preschool attachment security were examined for their effects on children's mental state language and expressions of emotional understanding in their conversation. Children discussed an emotionally salient event with their mothers and then relayed the…