This  study  examined  the  effects  of  individual  difference  (ID)  factors  on  changing  pragmatic abilities  among  L2  learners  of  English.  Participants  were  48  Japanese  EFL  students  in  an English-medium  university  in  Japan.  They  completed  a  pragmatic  speaking  test  (k=12)  that assessed  their  ability  to  produce  two  speech  acts:  requests  and  opinions,  in  hi...

the main goal of early detection of hearing impairment in children is early intervention. there is growing interest in early detection of hearing impairment in developing countries. the main purpose of this study was to investigate the spoken language development in severe to profound hearing impaired children and compared their speech intelligibility with normal hearing children at the same ag...

The role of speech production mechanisms in difficult speech comprehension is the subject of on-going debate in speech science. Two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses were conducted on neuroimaging studies investigating difficult speech comprehension or speech production. Meta-analysis 1 included 10 studies contrasting comprehension of less intelligible/distorted speech with more i...