in the healthcare context, whistleblowing has come to the fore of political, professional and public attention in the wake of major service scandals and mounting evidence of the routine threats to safety that patients face in their care. this paper offers a commentary and wider contextualisation of mannion and davies, ‘cultures of silence and cultures of voice: the role of whistleblowing in hea...

conclusions the findings of this study indicate that older children are more proficient in comprehension of color words compared to younger children, and girls are more proficient than boys. the two easiest and two most difficult color words for children to comprehend within the 3 age groups were “black” and “red” and “phosphoric-green” and “turquoise-blue,” respectively. there was a positive r...

Speaking is one important skill in language learning. EFL students are sometimes faced with problems, while speaking to their interlocutors due to the lack of sufficient linguistic knowledge, and they have to quit the conversation. This study examines the use of speaking strategies by some Iranian male and female EFL university students .The use of these strategies was examined in relation to t...

Speaking is one important skill in language learning. EFL students are sometimes faced with problems, while speaking to their interlocutors due to the lack of sufficient linguistic knowledge, and they have to quit the conversation. This study examines the use of speaking strategies by some Iranian male and female EFL university students .The use of these strategies was examined in relation to t...

In this study, we propose a speaker clustering algorithm based on reading and singing speech samples for each speaker. As a speaking style, singing introduces changes in the time-frequency structure of a speaker’s voice. The purpose of this study is to introduce advancements into speech systems such as speech indexing and retrieval which improve robustness to intrinsic variations in speech prod...

the aim of the current study was to examine the effect of metacognitive instruction on efl learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral language proficiency. fifty students of two upper-intermediate english courses participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental and control groups. for sixteen weeks the experimental group participat...

the present research was an attempt to provide new evidence for the efficacy of task-based techniques to speaking proficiency development. the primary focus of the study was to investigate the effects of task-based techniques on speaking proficiency development. in the second place, it tried to scrutinize the effect of gender on speaking proficiency development under task-based principles of la...

To improve the ASR of proper names a novel method based on the generation of pronunciation variants by means of phoneme-tophoneme converters (P2Ps) is proposed. The aim is convert baseline transcriptions into variants that maximally resemble actual name pronunciations that were found in a training corpus. The method has to operate in a cross lingual setting with native Dutch persons speaking Du...

We present a new feature-based method for estimating the speaking rate by detecting vowels in continuous speech. The features used are the modified loudness and the zerocrossing rate which are both calculated in the standard preprocessing unit of our speech recognition system. As vowels in general correspond to syllable nuclei, the feature-based vowel rate is comparable to an estimate of the le...

In this study, we propose a speaker clustering algorithm based on reading and singing speech samples for each speaker. As a speaking style, singing introduces changes in the time-frequency structure of a speaker’s voice. The purpose of this study is to introduce advancements into speech systems such as speech indexing and retrieval which improve robustness to intrinsic variations in speech prod...