The effect of a technique that gets English-as-a-Second-Language learners to tell the same story three times to different listeners with decreasing time for each retelling is examined. The technique allowed learners to perform at a level higher than their normal level of fluency. A transcript of a talk is appended. (Contains 12 references.)…

Stuttered sentences pronounced by 12 4- to 6-year-old children in spontaneous conversation were analyzed for length and grammatical complexity. Results indicated that sentences in which stuttering occurred within the first three words were significantly longer and more complex than sentences where no fluency failure was found. Implications for…

Notes that an earlier article in this journal introduced the process of building fluency in a language such as German by having students work through a set of procedures that touch on all communication skills. Shows how students can move from these beginning experiences to establish further control over the language. (RS)

Explored the effects of inherent task structure and processing load on narrative retelling task performance, analyzing task performance in terms of competition among fluency, complexity, and accuracy. Research with young adults found that degree of inherent task structure more strongly affected fluency of performance. Processing load influenced…

Gives background information on the journal's mini-series on reading assessment and intervention. States that over the past decade cognitive psychologists have learned that reading disabilities are primarily language-related disorders and neuropsychologists have advanced ideas on reading process. The mini-series seeks positive and significant…

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…

This study investigated the effects of second language (L2) proficiency and task-induced cognitive workload on participants' speech production and retention of information in an environment designed to simulate the demands faced by pilots receiving instructions from air-traffic controllers. Three groups of 20 participants (one…

This Research Brief draws on new results of Census 2000 data to take a closer look at children in immigrant families, that is, children with at least one foreign-born parent. For example, the brief reports that children in newcomer families are driving the nation's racial and ethnic transformation. Moreover, these children constitute a very…

The current study examined the effects of Korean elementary school teachers' accents on their students' listening comprehension. It also examined students' attitudes toward teachers with American-accented English (a native speaker model) and Korean-accented English (a nonnative speaker model). A matched-guised technique was used. A Korean American…

This study investigates the effect of a CALL application designed to enhance speaking and listening in Mandarin Chinese on advanced students' verbal skills, learning attitudes, and self-efficacy. A pretest/posttest experimental/control-group design with intact classes was employed to minimize treatment diffusion. Over the course of 14 weeks,…